Chromebooks are only good for their intended use - light web browsing and document editing. As soon as you get out of that little area, they just start to fall apart.

It's impossible to natively game on these. Steam doesn't support the Chrome OS, nor does any "PC" game. That means you either have to install Linux, which most common users probably aren't willing to do, or play lackluster Android ports. Even then, they're built on lower grade hardware, which means you're not going to get great performance out of them.

Programmers are going to lose all of their IDEs when they switch to a Chromebook. Eclipse? Gone. Visual Studio? Gone. There's a handful of online IDEs, but the ones that people are used to are gone. It's doable, but not preferable.

Unless there's an Android or Chrome OS port, most Windows programs aren't going to be available on a Chromebook. Photoshop works on Chromebooks, but has to be connected to the internet in order for it to work. A lack of native programs is what is holding back Linux, and if companies don't start porting to Chrome OS, the operating system is going to start to suffer.

With that being said, they're good enough. They're cheap,. They work. For a person that doesn't do more than some web browsing and the occasional document editing, then it suits all of their needs; for $200 - $300 less than a Windows laptop to boot. However, doing anything else starts to get hard, and sometimes gets impossible.