This. I'm in the military, so keenly interested in how much you can do without network. I have two XO-1 laptops and I was a Cr-48 test pilot (their label for their beta testers). I took the Cr-48 with me to Japan for Fukushima in 2011. ChromeOS was not all that useful. Why run ChromeOS when Xubuntu is available? Lubuntu? Pick your favorite lightweight Linux distro. After about a week I cried uncle and installed Xubuntu. Depending on network for the ability to type a document is non-sensical. If I recall, Google Docs didn't have offline mode yet, but due to that experience I have keenly attended to offline mode. It improves things, but it's not a panacea.

I don't think a laptop without network is ever going to be as awesome as one with network, but there's a lot of room on a laptop to do more than run AJAX applications in a browser (do they still talk about AJAX?) that offload all the smarts to a server-side app.