After going through several Linux laptops over the past decade, including a couple of Thinkpads, I agree. My current Chromebook running Ubuntu is by far my favorite.
Do you really feel like 4GB of RAM is enough? And do you happen to know if there are any Chromebooks that have upgradeable RAM? What kind of development do you primarily do on your Chromebook? I've been thinking about switching to a Chromebook, but I don't know if it's right for me just yet.
It depends on what you're doing. But there's a whole world out there of people being very productive on 4GB MacBook Airs, and Ubuntu uses far less memory than OS X.
Yeah, it's enough for me. It's my primary development machine by choice, and it's enough to do anything I need at a terminal (running emacs, developing and testing rails servers, docker builds, etc.) while keeping Chrome open with a few dozen apps including a few gmail and chat windows open.
He hasn't been able to adjust the screen backlighting, says he's got to try that again, with that issue it gives him 4-5 hours between recharges vs. the reported ~8 in the above linked item.