Chromebook silently successful?

I was looking at amazon.com today to look for a laptop, and saw that Acer's chromebook is actually at number 5 in the bestseller's list. Its a pretty surprising find because I remember when the Samsung's chromebook was launched, it was universally panned by reviewers and media (save engadget). If you search for a chromebook, you will see that all of them are rated a solid 4 stars.

Why is that the media reacted so different from actual users? The biggest argument that media had against chromebook was that for the same price you could buy a windows netbook which could do so much more. But it seems actual users are not looking to do so much more. Connectivity requirement was a big negative. But we are almost always connected. Most reviews of the chromebook laud its ease of use. They say that it may not replace someone's primary computer, but 90% of the use case is just using the internet for which it works very well. With decent hardware and good battery life, to me it all seems like a recipe for success.

Media inconsistent in their reviews?

When you look at the mobile rivalry between iOS and Android, the blogosphere generally tends to favour iOS, citing ease of use being more important than sheer number of features. Why is it, then, that in the case of chromebook ease of use and less features is a worse combination than a more complicated interface and more features? Frankly, I don't know. It maybe the case that most tech writers use a lot of windows or mac software, which obviously don't have any chrome OS equivalents, and therefore couldn't imagine themselves using them. But then, reviewers should be able to put themselves in the shoes of potential users when reviewing the product and not just use their own profile to judge a product.

Whatever the reason, it seems like media can't predict every trend. And when buying something for yourself, it always pays to do some work yourself to know if the product fits your needs.