I see your point, I do. It seems like all external software is going in the SaaS direction, where the vendor is keeping all of the data, so they are available over an API. So there are genuinely solid cases for Chromebooks.

The issue is how much power this gives to the vendors. I think we should be able to survive a vendor going poof, taking all our data with them. Having a general computing platform capable of mixing files and privileges seems to me like the only way of keeping this capability.