Based on my experiences with the CR-48 (which I used extensively for a few months), I have to suggest that you not get one of these laptops. Basically, ChromeOS is great, but using Atom processors is simply unacceptable for the tasks that they advertise. The only thing the CR-48 can do well is viewing static content -- and I mean truly static! Scrolling around on an otherwise-static web page is far to dynamic for it to handle. Want to play flash? Yeah right.

These new models have dual-core atoms, which will help, but mostly it's just the awful single-core performance that gets you. Even tying emails in gmail was an extremely painful experience; often the characters on the screen would lag significantly behind my tying, and it would take forever to load the different pages.

I don't think anyone is arguing that you can use these things for "real work". I'm going to argue that if you care about your time, you can't even use these things for any of the other stuff they advertise. Unless the new processors are significantly better, I'd say get something else.