Throw away? I hardly think most people need much more than what the chromebook offers - I did online schooling on this computer which is far slower than the chromebook....and I'm still using it today (about 3 years after purchase) more than any other computer at home. I have a core i7 desktop, yes, but while idle that uses 120 watts and makes the noise it takes to cool such juice. My little netbook with an Atom n270 is wherever I want it, often running without a fan (the only moving part), and perfectly capable for not only the work I did in research, presentations, and documents for school, it runs >90% of webpages, including live flash-based audio/visual/textual presentations that were my 'classroom' for courses which were online. Youtube is good without going fullscreen or having cpu-intensitve sites(e.g. myspace) in the background, and Hulu is reasonable if you don't go fullscreen.
Even ignoring the clock-speed increase - because it is pretty minor anyway - the Chromebook Atom should do better due to the fact that Intel moved the GPU and memory controller onto the processor for significant gains in both power use and performance(on the power use side it is huge). The new Atom also supports a pcie video decoder which would make fullscreen hulu no problem at all, but to date I do not know if the chromebooks have the add-in video decoder or a way to install one. Two more higher tech-specs on the chromebook which beat my system include a dual-core instead of single core and two gigs of ram instead of one. The memory might just be for show, chrome OS is on top of linux and in linux I never run out of ram, easily getting fully logged-in and ready to go using only 40 megs of ram - Windows is the only OS I have seen using 900 megs of ram just to get to the desktop. The dual-core should help significantly when doing youtube or hulu with facebook and myspace open in the background.
