To me what's funny about Acer's statement is not only do they sell mostly inferior Windows 8 laptops, they also sell the inferior chromebook too (compared to the $249 Samsung Chromebook).
I can't help but chuckle reading the above comments (not in a disparaging way, rather in a "I guess I think differently" kind of way) mainly because I bought a chromebook just over a week ago (the Samsung one - what you thought I bought the Acer one after my comment in the first sentence? :grin
, largely because it was only $249, I had $75 in Best Buy gift cards that I hadn't used since Christmas 2011, and I wanted to check it out. I really like the chromebook for what it is. The chromebook boots up extremely fast - it takes me as long to log in as it does for the chromebook to cold boot - and the Chrome OS browser is very fast too. (Of course, my chromebook's home page/favorite tab, as is the case on my Windows desktops/laptops, is msn.com, so sometimes I search using Bing on Google's Chrome OS chromebook :grin:.) The chromebook is very light (2.4 pounds) and the battery life is decent if not spectacular (probably 6-7 hours or so). For the kind of things I like to do (blog on various tech, sports, and other sites, conduct internet searches on whatever item of interest pops into my head at a given time), a chromebook makes a lot more sense than a tablet. (To be fair, a Windows 8 laptop also makes more sense than a chromebook when I require broader, especially off-line, functionality, but the chromebook is cheaper than just about all Windows 8 laptops and it is better than a Windows OS device if you want to do quick web browsing from a cold boot.)
Based on the comments I've seen on various tech websites, I think a lot of people disagree with the following, but I view chromebooks as being more in the same consumer space as tablets than I view them as being in the same space as Windows OS laptops (though the latter is also true to some degree). Both chromebooks and tablets are fundamentally second devices that have some limitations but do certain things well (though the things chromebooks and tablets do well are a little different). The things chromebooks do well are more important to me than the things tablets do well; obviously the opposite would be true for some other people.