Starting with the core use case for most people seems like a smart engineering and business decision. Chromebooks value proposition is to be the simplest, safes

Starting with the core use case for most people seems like a smart engineering and business decision. Chromebooks value proposition is to be the simplest, safest and cheapest laptops to access the web. It makes it clear what people will be able to do with it and makes it different enough to more general laptop to be marketable. Building this on ChromeOS seems like the simplest way to reach those goal. Extending Chrome means that most of the UX is already understood by users and the codebase is already built with many of the same goals in mind. I completely understand wanting to have more capabilities on these Chromebooks though. I ran elementaryOS on an HP Chromebook for many years and it was amazing for the price. A great battery life, good keyboard and touchpad and a full blown OS that is also lightweight and snappy. But I think that the annoying thing is that the same hardware isn't sold by the manufacturer without ChromeOS.