Totally agreed, but given the engineering efforts that Google have gone through to make the hardware and software stack work in harmony and given Google employees use Chromebooks the author of the article wants to set up a working dev environment by adding to Chrome rather than nuking it and coming up with a semi-custom solution. My first comment was to point this out.

We all know you can put Chromebooks into dev mode and load Ubuntu, in fact I thought it was necessary to get the most out of Chromebooks. If it turns out that Chromebooks can make decent dev environments without nuking and installing Ubuntu or whatever and if they can run Android apps then Chromebook suddenly become a very interesting value proposition.