Its pretty much the anti smart TV argument, where I have access to much better systems so a halfway attempt merely gets in the way.

Also I didn't mention it but its kinda implied that "standard windows laptop" has too little memory to actually work well, a two hour battery, an old fashioned slow spinning disk, and lots of crudware pre-installed and hard to remove, whereas chromebook implies "it just works" seconds out of the box, a ten hour battery and SSD means no moving parts. Also the windows box is inherently insecure.

If all either will ever do is rdesktop / ssh into clustered machines, and I'll never do any local processing other than maybe play games on the windows laptop, its no contest that the chromebook experience is better.