Not sure why someone would want to invest in an OS that needs to emulate, or remote into others to get some benefit of another OS (windows or otherwise). Seems like if you need to do that, why not just use the OS you are remoting/emulating?

Look at it: it's just an OS with everything but the browser stripped out. You know what? Those other parts were actually useful and stripping them out makes no sense. GNU/Linux can run a browser just fine; it can also run quite a lot of Windows programs through Wine without the need for any kind of remoting. So, Chrome can run under Windows? Well, guess what... Linux can do that too. And it can run all the native applications out there, which by and large yield a better user experience (not to mention performance) than a browser-based app can. Don't even think about 3D games. Sometimes less is simply less.

Think iPad, not "Windows equivalent".

The point is to make an ultralight OS for netbooks and such that boots fast, lasts long on a single charge, and lets people access cloud-based services. Whether ChromeOS can do all that successfully remains to be seen, but its goal was never to compete heads-on with Windows, but more to challenge and perhaps supersede the likes of MeeGo, Jolicloud, and "instant-on" secondary OSes from laptop manufacturers (Asus ExpressGate, Dell Latitude On, etc.). Granted, cloud computing may one day bypass traditional OSes altogether -- and ChromeOS may be a stepping stone to that -- but even if that doesn't happen, ChromeOS may still be useful.

From one perspective (the current one for power users), it might look like "Why would I want to limit myself to online apps when there are so many good desktop ones?"

But from another perspective (that of simple users and perhaps all of us in the future), the question might be "Why would I want to bother with Office 2012 when Google Docs 2012 is just as good, free, and never needs to be patched?" As more and more programs move to the cloud, the underlying OS becomes less and less important and can, after a while, start getting in the way. Why load the entire bloat of Windows when all you really want to do is check your email and maybe look at a few PDFs?

The two perspectives may well become blurrier as web applications become richer and smarter and their data and processing become hybridized, half in the cloud and half on the desktop. Already Gmail can cache its data on your hard drive while getting its code from the cloud, giving you offline access, faster searches, and an always-up-to-date version with zero maintenance. For web games, once browsers get better hardware-accelerated 3D (through Flash, HTML5, or otherwise), a lot of the code could be maintained and stored online while rarely-updated data like graphics and sound can be downloaded once and stored offline. Think Valve's Steam or Microsoft's ClickOnce but without the overhead of Windows.

Anyway, the popularity of simple internet-connected devices like netbooks and iPads proves that such devices ARE welcome even if they can't do everything a full-blown uber-rig can. ChromeOS may not be a technological revolution or even a significant change in paradigm, but if it alters the end-user experience significantly enough, THAT's all that matters. If you can get a netbook with ChromeOS that boots in 5 seconds flat, lasts 15 hours on a charge, and costs $150... wow. That's a pipe dream right now, but there's hope. At the very least, it'd be great to see ChromeOS packaged as a plug-in OS; a self-contained fast-boot environment on a USB stick or ExpressCard for everyone who already has Windows but doesn't need its power most of the time.

A more valid complaint would be "But isn't that what Android's supposed to do?" To a certain degree, yes, but even the best Android browsers currently lack the power and customizability of Chrome or Firefox, and the Android UI isn't optimized for a keyboard-and-mouse experience. Google said they eventually plan to merge ChromeOS and Android, but until that happens, they're still targeted at subtly different niches. Perhaps Google also wants ChromeOS to be centrally-controlled the way Chrome (the browser) currently is and not the way Android is (centrally built but then haphazardly adopted and modified by third parties, drastically altering user experience and delaying updates).

You're missing a very important point:

Only a masochist puts Linux on a Mac. This is why hackintoshes exist in the first place: because sometimes Linux is NOT an adequate solution!

Your chances of converting somebody who is running OS X to Linux is approaching zero, outside the lab at least.