The middle ground of markets like this is always a crap-fest, it's the same with phones: when you're not solely competing on price (performance is ~no object) or performance (price is ~no object), you end up trying and cram in as much crap as possible to differentiate your product. Look at any mid-range laptop or phone's sales pitch and it'll scream features and specs, and consumers are drawn into trying to compare by these metrics, and the game becomes all about these pointless numbers, rather than how well it'll actually just handle what you want it to do. As a manufacturer, you care more about having a processor with a faster clock speed, or a hard disk with more space than a setup that'll launch launch Chrome and get to Facebook in n seconds.

Chromebooks are perfectly positioned to totally occupy this middle-ground with a fast-ish machine that just works, I don't know why they haven't pulled it off yet.