Example of Chrome OS best use case?

This morning I had the first instance of the Cr-48 being a better choice than my regular computer when the two devices were side by side, but it was a narrow circumstance.

I had turned off my main computer (a Dell Studio XPS 8000 running Windows 7) last night. This morning, I wanted to see if a new episode of This Week in Google (a podcast from the Twit network at twit.tv) had come out. Normally, I would boot the computer, connect my Zune player (2nd gen, 16GB, for the idly curious), and use the Zune software to look for new episodes. But, I was in a hurry to get to work, so instead I booted up my Cr-48 (which takes about 15 seconds to boot) and went to twit.tv to see what the latest release was.  This saved me probably 75 seconds, maybe -- my Dell fully boots in about a minute, plus time to open the Chrome browser and type in the address.

Now, if there had been a new episode available, I would still have to have booted up the Dell and connected the Zune. In what is the only drawback in an otherwise excellent media player, the Zune player requires the Zune software (in itself pretty good - better than iTunes, anyway, for my purposes). I abhor the locked-in, "walled garden", stuntware (purposefully stunted software/hardware) approach to computing, and was quite annoyed at discovering my then-new Zune would force me into exactly that. Each element of the ecosystem is excellent, but I bridle at having to be confined by an "ecosystem" at all. But, I digress.

I would have had to boot up the big computer because, obviously, the Zune software will not run on the Cr-48. Nothing will run on the Cr-48 except the Chrome browser and the pieces that hang off Chrome. Another kind of walled garden?

It's certainly stuntware.