Daring Fireball posted a great analysis of the new Chrome OS.  However, he demonstrates one of the common misconceptions about modern web platforms.  Money quote:

Web apps largely consist of server-side code, with a relatively thin layer of JavaScript that runs on the client. Data, too, mostly resides on the network, not the client machine.

This is exactly the misconception What is a Cloud Application on our wiki tries to address.

John’s statement is true for most deployed web apps today, but only for historical reasons.  There is not (anymore) any technical limitation to building full client-side apps in the browser.*  With HTML5 ApplicationCache and offline storage, its entirely possibly to create a web app that “installs” itself onto a local machine and can run anytime. The capability is there; we just need developer tools and developer knowledge to catch up.

• As in most things these days, this does not apply to IE.  But I’m talking only about the browsers that would be used on a “web-only” device.