Of course, ads never made anything free in the first place, you are still paying but indirectly. Marketing budget for clothing, movies, games, etc. are gigantic and factored into the price. In addition, ads are displayed all around us, whether or not we care about the product. The long term consequence of adblocking is that no one will pay for ads at which point they will simply go away. I don't have a problem with this.

From the linked ChromeShell page: "ChromeShell is a non-google affiliated replacement shell for windows", ie. this _is_ windows, which would explain why it's not much better than windows. Any observed gain would be linked to the presumably lighter ui of this new shell. Since, this has nothing to do with google's chrome-os appart for the fact that it copies its interface, no performance implication should be derived from it.