eh, I own an Acer Chromebook R11 and am pretty happy with it...
The battery life is wonderful for that price bracket (~8-10 hours, <300€). I used crouton for a few month, which enabled me to install Ubuntu 14.04 in dual-boot. you could switch between ChromeOS and the chosen Linux window manager (i first used unity but switched to i3wm eventually).
At some point, i removed it again because I hardly used the Linux environment anymore. There a pretty fine text editors as offline chrome-extensions available (i.e. Caret) and that was the only two use-cases I had for the laptop... browsing the internet and making text notes.
BTW, a lot of webapps, or "Web browser app" as you call them, have offline support. So no, you don't need an internet connection to use them.
Also have a R11 Chromebook and love it. I do use Crouton but been also using GNUroot as does not require developer.
What I love is being able to do cloud development (Linux) on a commercial laptop.
I wish Google would push this harder as a great dev solution. My biggest gripe is small storage on most CBs. Plus no sdcard access from containers on the R11. Also all Android runs in same container.
The battery life is wonderful for that price bracket (~8-10 hours, <300€). I used crouton for a few month, which enabled me to install Ubuntu 14.04 in dual-boot. you could switch between ChromeOS and the chosen Linux window manager (i first used unity but switched to i3wm eventually).
At some point, i removed it again because I hardly used the Linux environment anymore. There a pretty fine text editors as offline chrome-extensions available (i.e. Caret) and that was the only two use-cases I had for the laptop... browsing the internet and making text notes.
BTW, a lot of webapps, or "Web browser app" as you call them, have offline support. So no, you don't need an internet connection to use them.