We agree to disagree. I don't see any of these things as issues for my use case. My parents don't have a computer now. They don't want to listen to music and they mostly want to consume pictures of their grandkids which we would email to them or post to Picasa. The video chat through google talk is icing on the cake.
I can't get rid of my 'real' laptop because I need to interface with other hardware like my Arduino, etc. But for emailing and reading my news feed I like the Cr-48. Would the same purpose be served by a different netbook? Probably but I don't have one of those to compare to.
And my experience with fast user switching on windows is totally different from yours. Maybe it's the age of the laptop and not having an SSD but it's not even something I consider doing it's so slow. When my kids want to check their email, we fire up an incognito session on chrome on the existing windows session. Again, probably to do with my hardware.
I think it's important to not compare this to Windows. Windows is such a complete disaster on so many fronts of course ChromeOS seems like a better idea. The problem I and other have with it is "ChromeOS isn't really a better idea when compared to other operating systems." It's more crippled then iOS and Android for gains that aren't significantly better. Sure Chrome maybe a better browser but that's just a matter of porting Chrome not a new OS.
As long as both users are already logged in and (obviously) the other user's stuff hasn't been paged out, fast user switching on Windows is lightning fast. 4 GB of RAM, standard with laptops today, is more than sufficient to ensure that.
I can't get rid of my 'real' laptop because I need to interface with other hardware like my Arduino, etc. But for emailing and reading my news feed I like the Cr-48. Would the same purpose be served by a different netbook? Probably but I don't have one of those to compare to.
And my experience with fast user switching on windows is totally different from yours. Maybe it's the age of the laptop and not having an SSD but it's not even something I consider doing it's so slow. When my kids want to check their email, we fire up an incognito session on chrome on the existing windows session. Again, probably to do with my hardware.