Key problem is it's ARM and not Intel processor. How much of a real developer experience a crouton style solution enables on ARM, I'm not sure. But I'm guessing it's a lot more limited.

Limited in what respect? There's plenty of Linux distros which run on ARM/ARM64.

I guess I was only referring to being able to install anything precompiled for Intel linux, which would include just about any proprietary software. I had a few problems running things in my past attempts with this (running Ubuntu on an Android tablet). However I was surprised to see from Googling around that people have indeed now got most common dev tools working on the Samsung ARM chromebook so I might be completely wrong about it

As voltagex_ pointed out you will have no problem with open-source packages, but I imagine you could try QEMU for running proprietary x86 bits in a pinch.

Limited in two respects:

1. The lack of a pointing device 2. Missing keys on the keyboard: escape, tilde, brackets.

Are there Linux distros that work well under those constraints? Honest question.

Sorry this is snarky but a quick Google search would have shown you some good short resources to data.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Linux+arm+support

How do you know that it runs ARM?

It runs Tegra X1 SOC : http://www.nvidia.com/object/tegra-x1-processor.html