Apples to Oranges. You're asking why there aren't as many ChromeBook vendors as there are Android vendors? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that consu

Apples to Oranges. You're asking why there aren't as many ChromeBook vendors as there are Android vendors? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that consumers are buying less traditional computers and buying more phones and tablets. No one is wishing anything is a big deal. I am not attacking Android or the bogus Ars Technica articles which keep pushing the line that AOSP isn't open. I'm criticizing this weird claim that ChromeOS is more of a walled garden, which it most decidedly is not. Chromium is "more" open source than Android because it is developed continuously in the open, there's no "code bomb" that publishes the entire Next version once a year. Secondly, the surface area of Chrome-specific APIs or services are tiny and insignificant compared to native devices. Those two features limit platform lockin and increase portability. The Chrome Web Store/Chrome Apps are simply a red herring. The vast vast majority of ChromeOS "apps" are links to hosted sites, the majority of which work on any browser. That's been the major problem getting people to pay for stuff in the CWS as you can cut/paste the URL and avoid the store entirely for many apps. Leaving aside Chromium, many people have taken WebKit and made desktops based on it. WebOS, the new SteamBox uses a frontend built with WebKit, the PlayStation UI has various parts built with a browser. There was also Jolicloud. It is not hard to take a Linux distribution and slap a browser on it as the desktop launcher. Sorry, it's just not. Whether people are interested in doing that and think it is something they could sell for a profit is a different story that has nothing to do with the technical difficulty of doing it.