Over the last month, I've moved many of our 25 customer service team from crappy, ~$200 Dell laptops to Asus Chromeboxes ($160 with 2 GB of RAM). The feedback has been universally positive, because the Chromeboxes are so much more responsive than Chrome on a low-end Windows machine.
A few caveats:
+ We've found Chrome more responsive with 4 GB of RAM, especially when you keep open many tabs, such as large spreadsheets in Google Docs. We didn't see any improvement moving to 8 GB.
+ We have struggled with editing PDFs. Dochub has the rotate and delete page functions we need, but can't save in place to Google Drive (it only edits). NoteablePDF is supposed to add rotate and delete soon.
+ We had to buy a new scanner that can save directly to Google Drive. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EKW6JZ4 worked well, after the Epson required being tethered to a PC.
A few caveats:
+ We've found Chrome more responsive with 4 GB of RAM, especially when you keep open many tabs, such as large spreadsheets in Google Docs. We didn't see any improvement moving to 8 GB.
+ We have struggled with editing PDFs. Dochub has the rotate and delete page functions we need, but can't save in place to Google Drive (it only edits). NoteablePDF is supposed to add rotate and delete soon.
+ We had to buy a new scanner that can save directly to Google Drive. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EKW6JZ4 worked well, after the Epson required being tethered to a PC.
+ We found Google Cloud Print to be unreliable, so we bought a hardware print server that works great: http://www.amazon.com/Lantronix-XPS1002CP-01-S-xPrintServer-...
We're not the market for $149 Chromebooks, but I'm glad to see Google investing to expand the market for ChromeOS.