You can't build for NaCl from CrOS, and as it stands you don't have the toolchain (editors, debuggers, shells, etc) one's used to on other platforms. I understand a $400 phone not being able to run it's own toolchain, a $1300 computer less so.
It's much easier to develop on a Chromebook than you probably think. There are many editor choices, there is Web Inspector for debugging, there is an SSH client (in NaCl), there is developer mode, there is Crouton which gives you a Ubuntu chroot without losing the rest of ChromeOS[1]. I don't do NaCl, so I can't speak to how much pain that is, but for web development I find Cloud9, Web Inspector, Secure Shell to be more than adequate.
I've got a Chromebook sitting to the right of my keyboard, and routinely use it as an SSH terminal (that and the keyboard is exactly why I have it). Remote is sufficient, but not always desirable (not just offline, latency can get in the way as well); and crouton and such are kludges vs. having a proper *nix environment within CrOS (not to mention losing verified boot, which I see as a plus overall but glad it can be turned off)
Yeah, I agree that Crouton and the like are "cheating" a little bit, and I don't use them personally. I think you're being a little unfair here, though. You want verified boot and a full *NIX offline toolchain. Aren't those incompatible things? Probably the closest thing you can get to local development without cheating is if something like VirtualBox were ported to NaCl, which I don't believe exists, yet.
Not a full environment; just enough of one for average web development (meaning vim/emacs, git, ruby/nodejs/etc, NaCl compiler, and associated debuggers), a small enough set to be vetted by Google and run at low privilege while still letting an average developer get started out of the box w/o needing to figure out hosting or such right away.
Hell, just adding some project management to the inspector to act as a psuedo-IDE for Chrome apps would be a start. I've got personal attachment to *nix from using so much of it, some 12-year old that stumbled into the devtools has no such attachment.
But you're asking them to open up all of the kernel APIs to Vimscript, Emacs Lisp, Node, and Ruby... that's no different than just being another Linux Distro, which they didn't do for security reasons. If you want all of that, I don't understand why you are against chroot.
Besides, the fact that Chromebooks are running linux under the hood is an implementation detail. They could very well be running FreeDOS as far as the user should be concerned; the platform is Chrome.
