If this ends up supporting Adobe Creative Suite better than Wine, then that will be a huge win as it is a very common "why I can't use Linux" excuse.
How good is Apple's documentation compared to Microsofts? This is important for a clean-room implementation.

If it has a keyboard and mouse as first class citizens (or at least a mouse!) count me in, else forget about it.

Bandaid, meet solution.

This kids, is what we call a Bandaid Solution - its the type of solution that doesn't really fix anything and allows the problem to fester underneath. It is generally the only type of solution that Ubuntu community knows. Don't believe me? 9/10 posts on the forums suggest a dirty hack or the blood sacrifice of a goat (on a full moon) to "fix" a problem.

These idiots are the posterboys of Linux and hell, somehow even the posterboys of FOSS? Whoever is picking these posterboys needs to be dragged into the street and shot.

I think the real solution here is to re-align Open Source/Free Software community to one of the dozen other distributions which are much more suitable. Let Canonical hawk their crappy wares over in the corner.

You're pretty much right. Except for the part about the touchscreen device users who prefer Metro over Android and iOS. Anybody who has used WP7 and WP8 knows that the interface is freakin excellent. Hands down winner... I love it on a phone - I HATE it on a desktop.

I could have told you this without an expensive study - the results are exactly what I would have expected.
But will management listen to this study or will they continue to live in fantasy land where people actually like their poor service and advertising?

Oh, so you have a decent office quite on Android or on niche OSes like Haiku? Cool which one is it?
That's what I thought.
Also, Open Office does far more formats and functions than Google Docs and I don't know about cloud MS Office, but definitely more formats. You (or your trusted hoster/friend) could also run an instance to ensure lower latency for your local area and better privacy if the software for this service is open sourced.

Oh just an update.
ChromeOS does not have an X driver but rather uses Linux Frame buffer and some acceleration extensions, however the spirit/intent/point of my comment still applies!

I've been watching all this happen for years. It's why I set up and run the servers the way I do so that any third party services (like Amazon S3) have zero knowledge of how to decrypt my data or if possible I use software and services that give the user power over their data.

http://userdatamanifesto.org/
User Data Manifesto is a quite new site set up by Frank Karlitschek of the OwnCloud project (check it out, it's great) which outlines 8 points which give the user the control over their data in the cloud (kinda like the 4 freedoms, either Roosevelt's or Stallmans). It also has a list of projects which respect said points.

A real Linux distro is where it is at.
The big advantage over other ARM based netbook hacks is that this one has a driver accelerated X (since ChromeOS is just a Linux distro) and not just some Android graphics driver.
Too bad it looks like they won't be selling them in Australia.

BASH
Though World War vi might be good too - http://freecode.com/projects/wordwarvi

Word War vi is a side-scrolling shoot 'em up '80s style arcade game. You pilot your "vi"per craft through core memory, rescuing lost .swp files, avoiding OS defenses, and wiping out those memory hogging emacs processes. When all the lost .swp files are rescued, head for the socket which will take you to the next node in the cluster.

In-a-box works best with Linux because you can provide the entire setup in one go as well as having a built-in update mechanism... Besides, letting OSX and Windows touch the internets is a little insane. Coincidentally Buddycloud (http://buddycloud.org) has a "In-A-Box" thing plus documentation/demo video to help you roll your own instance.

http://buddycloud.com/ - there's your user-oriented crap. Enjoy.

Actually, sometimes people use the wrong tool for the job. Diaspora is one of those times.

But it's probably better to put the work into http://buddycloud.org/ instead. Far better base for a federated social network than Diaspora... And a better core team (who welcome contributors). Getting rid of all that Ruby crap would also take a lot of work, and because they're not standards based you can't just (easily) write a Diaspora node in a more sane ecosystem.

I agree with pretty much everything you said... But getting rid of ARM? What sort of stupid bullshit is that? The problem has *NOTHING* to do with the architecture and everything to do with Microsoft. Putting it into perspective - there is not a single ARM device that you can buy today that has UEFI... And somehow the problem is ARMs' fault?

I guess perhaps the mindset of the embedded industry who don't think that proprietary blob drivers are a bad thing (hey, nobody but us will ever update the software!) is partly to blame. Yes, most of these companies use ARM, but it still has nothing to do with ARM.