[Eee Pad Transformer Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] earlyberd:
Chrome OS is actually a very heavyweight OS as soon as you start opening up a new tab for every web equivalent application you would typically expect to use on a laptop. Right now in Windows, I have just the Google Chrome browser running by itself, with 7 tabs open. Each of the tabs corresponds with one of the various Google services I have on my Google account (Google+, Maps, Gmail, Calendar, Docs, and Picasa), as well as one tab for xda. Tallied up, Google Chrome is eating over 800MB of memory to keep these tabs open. That's just for basic Google services running the background. You can see this type of memory allocation happening on Android as well, as most of the time I only have about 300MB of memory reported as free on my Transformer after a fresh boot. While that doesn't necessarily mean the OS is going to start thrashing as soon as you attempt to load another process, it does however mean that a lot of websites that operate on memory hogs like Flash are going to take much longer to load, or may just crash the browser entirely.

I understand that the various flavors of Ubuntu can potentially run smoothly on old and underpowered hardware, but you're forgetting about all the extra overhead added when the browser replaces the desktop environment as the framework through which the user's applications are loaded. Native Linux applications like gedit, Pidgin, Banshee, and OpenOffice.org all run smoothly on older or underpowered hardware because they have small design teams and operate on the philosophy of making their products usable by everyone. Web applications, however, can't interface directly with your system hardware, which adds to the overhead and memory consumption. And in further in regards to optimization, have you ever tried playing a Flash-based game, not a video, inside of the Android browser on a Tegra device? It's a slide show with most of them, if you can get them to play. The developers of web applications operate on the assumption that most of these applications are being used by desktops and laptops with 2GB of memory or more, using the same old x86 processors and dedicated video cards.

Even if ARM SoC systems are theoretically capable of running the same sorts of applications at acceptable speeds, the fact remains that the hardware is so radically different that Google, Apple, HP, and RIM have all chosen to adopt completely new operating systems to take advantage of the hardware, instead of attempting to retrofit outdated and bloated web applications for use on the new hardware. We rely on "apps" for services like Facebook, Google Talk, Gmail, and Google Maps instead of going to the actual web sites because of all the extra overhead from doing it through a browser. It's not a question of whether the Transformer or any other Tegra device can run Chrome OS, it's a question of efficiency.

Ubuntu runs okay for the initial boot up on my Transformer, but then painstakingly slow as soon as I fire up a web browser. That's the point I'm making. It doesn't matter how well the underlying operating system runs, you have to understand that running Chrome OS is not even close to the same thing as running a Linux distro like Ubuntu. Chrome OS only strikes us as seeming lightweight and speedy because the typical Chromebook runs on a solid state drive and a minimum of 2GB of RAM at around 1066Mhz and up, and speedy boot up time is the main draw of Chrome OS. If the typical SSD supports read speeds of 200 MB/s and the OS only takes up 800MB of space, then a little basic math should tell you that the computer would have no problems booting up in less than 5 seconds. The fastest NAND-based device I've ever seen was able to transfer at about 30MB/s, and I doubt Tegra SoC devices could even hit that on a good day. For the ~700MB worth of Android Honeycomb that needs to be loaded into RAM for the Transformer to boot and be usable, it takes around 45 seconds. By that logic it should come as no surprise that Chrome OS would take at least as long to boot up, in which case you've pretty much defeated the point of running an "instant-on" OS. If you install Ubuntu, Windows 7, or Mac OSX on a SSD, you too will be able to boot up in a fraction of the time just based on the overall increase in I/O. I know this because I run a SSD on my own desktop computer (It's amazing!).

Straight from the horse's mouth:

http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/how-tos-and-troubleshooting/developer-faq

The current Tegra hardware is not capable of a fluid user experience for Chrome OS, and Google knows this. Whether or not you agree with Google's idea of a fluid user experience is up to you, but the point is that the Transformer, even with all possible optimization included, would not run Chrome OS anywhere near the same as an actual Chromebook, just based on the hardware.