Yeah, I had the original Chromebook Pixel and the Pixelbook and they were both great. Somehow I'm still using the Pixelbook today and it chugs along.

That said, its hard to justify the prices for these premium Chromebooks. When I picked them up they were heavily discounted with some developer code or other.

I also agree with the shaky future as far as being able to actually opening these things up with developer tooling. It seems like they've simply been on a path to rollback all of that.