Google are not selling hardware. They're selling a system. Like Apple, in order to make that system all work together well, they lock it down, especially when they give you warranties and guarantees as Apple does.
Selling a system that by rights is Open Source & Free? You mean they're a bunch of free-loaders, locked down... Lets examine locked down and see whats under the hood.
ARMv7l (Flattened Device Tree) Samsung Exynos - Chrome OS - or Chromium is essentially nothing more than Ubuntu with Chroot jails similar to BSD. You can soon examine the devices guts if you flash the bootloader with uboot (ripping open your chromebook will void your warranty) but meh who gives a fsck! It was eye opening getting into the guts of Chrome OS, to discover that Chromebooks don't support booting there own Remix Android OS. ie: If you'd like to boot an alternative operating system, such as RISC OS Open or Remix OS Android or even any variant of free and open-source, you haven't got much of a prayer thanks to this BIOS freeloaded legacy ******** making the rounds from M$ & China with hidden "ME" closed source microcode controlling all your cryptography (gee thanks INTEL!).
I can say with pretty much 100% certainty that it's definitely Ubuntu under the hood and if you install Bastille Linux you get the added bonus of having a pretty secured OS which does interesting things to whats hidden under the hood - then there is replacing OpenSSL with LibreSSL and many more fun pass-times to be had (tweaking the kernel). Just don't expect to be able to boot ETH-Oberon, Redox OS, FreeDOS or Plan 9 from Bell-Labs easily and when it comes to TPM or trusted computing modules, I find any BIOS that wants to disable the Linux KVM across multiple devices highly "suspect!" and lets be honest, it doesn't respect your device freedoms if it wont simply boot what you want without expecting you to jump through hoops first. Sure it'll boot alternative systems, but it expects you to go out of your way to be able to do it! An end users will just view that as "*****" Google!
UEFI - is the biggest load of ******** making the rounds at present - an emphatic "NO" to something that enables Boot-on-LAN inside your Insyde-H20 BIOS from China is not a "GOOD" or "trust-worthy" thing to have inside your CPU or Microcontroller - "*****" Microsoft!
As an end user I find it extremely frustrating that I have to search around for hardware without added ********. Sadly Chromebooks fall into that category, because they support this legacy mode ******** which they've all but come out and said is "********" so why is it still being supported across the entire industry?
The answer is blowing in the Wind, they spent billions on all those backdoor-ed micro-controllers and now that nobody wants them - they're loosing millions for being *****. When these guys say "think of the children", I do, I confess, I think about how they're going to grow up seriously...
"hating all of you!" - Snowden, the new household name for the 21st Century.. Along with 10 Million infected Android handsets from China & AllWinner Cortex Kernel device debugging backdoors.
An this kiddies is why you can't have nice things, because the Google talkback service provides a device bridge into your Mobile phone so "Developers" at google can rape your device contacts and don't even get started on the encryption protecting you from BAD-Guys, because the bad-guys have been ******* with it since 1984 - claiming its for your own "Good!" & never forget they're trustworthy.. Thats why TCPCRYPT hasn't got an RFC yet whilst the IPSEC guys are still promoting the use of the BROKEN data-encryption standard.
Chrome - don't gaze at it for too long, your eyeballs will start to bleed!
"If your doing something you shouldn't be doing, then you have no reasonable expectation of privacy!" ~ E.Schmidt former CEO of Google. (And one time intern at Bell-Labs!) - "Fake Intelligence, is fake intelligence!" no matter how the dude wants to spin the fact he grew up as trailer park trash or the fact that the GCC dropped right out of those self same "fake intelligence!" labs. Remember kids, "a Greedy self serving ***** is still in the end nothing but a greedy self serving *****!"