Fascinating, however I'm quite curious about whether they took a serious look at utilizing CoreOS over Debian 7 (and if so, why Debian 7 was chosen instead).
The agent https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/container-agent and manifest format https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/containers#contai... are not distro specific, and the glue to start them on boot could be easily adapted to other distro.
As the Fedora docs say, it's "often running in uncharted innovative territory," which is great if you want the latest stuff on your desktop, but it's not what you really want in a server distro. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is derived from Fedora every few years so it's battle tested and stable, in the same way Debian is.
For servers in the Red Hat lineage, use RHEL or CentOS, esp now that Red Hat has officially joined forces with CentOS (http://www.redhat.com/about/news/press-archive/2014/1/red-ha...).
And we have to use the indefinite article, "a desktop", never … your desktop.
LMCTFY is just a piece of what Docker does. They can be made to work together, even.
Is there more to this? Most OSes have great docker support (Ubuntu et al) and etcd (the kv/orchestration tool you speak of) is open source and available to most distros as well.
CoreOS does this by utilizing Linux containers via Docker to easy–bake applications through individual containers of which are explictly isolated from eachother, aiding in the problem of static/dynamic shared libraries causing dependency issues.
Now you can of course utilize all of this on a distro like Debian, and even borrow the best of CoreOS like etcd (for one example).
TL;DR; CoreOS features awesome concepts and services like etcd, and fleet, and more that doesn't mean you cannot do the same with Debian, but it won't be native, and it would not be very light weight out-of-the-box compared to CoreOS.
gce is one of the providers listed in the official docs, and I assume the CoreOS guys have had some interaction with gce people.