[mestudent]

To be honest I expect a chromebook to be priced similar or at the very least $200 for me to be competitive with a more powerful/portable netbook.

His expectations aren't off, the manufacturing limitations just don't meet them.

[samuel]

Asus is going to sell(presumably) the eee x101 running MeeGo for 200$, with decent specs for a "net oriented" computer(1 core Atom, 1GB RAM, 8GB SSD), so aren't manufacturing limitations what drive them away from that price tag. May be Google doesn't want to be identified with the somewhat crappy experience that low end hardware may deliver, just as they don't want Android to be associated with cheap smartphones, but with the iPhone competitors.

Which would be silly because their "OS" is much more limited than Windows 7, even the Starter version, and its only compelling feature would be to run on much cheaper hardware.