What you say appears to be true, yet quite misleading since there's a simple process, provided by Google and built into the device, for flashing the BIOS (or at least there was on the Series 5 Chromebooks):

http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-fo...

Ah, thanks for the clarification. That'll learn me to parrot information from random people.

hmm. I saw somewhere it was characterized as highly hackable

I'd get something like this instead, and put Debian on it:

http://us.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/model/PT.SJ4P2.001

I'm currently using two types of devices:

-- 10" Acer AspireOne netbooks. They are cheap, and Ubuntu works flawlessly (true before 12.04)

-- ALIX boards from pcengines.ch. They are even cheaper, and low-power, and with RS-232 console port. Perfect if you don't need CPU power.

but for the cases when I need to do packet trace on a Gigabit link, I need to make sure the traffic is low enough for the acer netbook to catch up