Entry level Windows laptops and Chromebooks are competitive on price and specification. OEM Windows licensing is essentially free on these machines. The very cheapest Chromebooks (~$150) undercut the cheapest Windows laptops by using a Rockchip ARM processor, although this limits performance.

Users understand the value proposition of ChromeOS - it is more limited than Windows, but it is more reliable and secure. For many users, this is a very worthwhile tradeoff. Two of the ten best selling laptops on Amazon are Chromebooks.

http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Computers-Accessories-Lap...

Those "real" Windows laptops have smartphone CPUs (and less RAM than recent smartphones, to add insult to injury); and run in the same price spectrum as Chromebooks – there's $200 ARM Chromebooks, too.

Actually useful versions cost around $250+ in both cases.

New Atom chips are actually quite fast -- certainly they're much faster than the ones in netbooks. Also, Windows 10 runs quite well in 2GB of RAM, for most ordinary purposes.

In my experience, these machines browse faster than Chromebooks, support more tabs (in Firefox), let you use non-Google browsers (eg Vivaldi), and run lots of stuff that Chromebooks don't (eg Microsoft Office, iTunes, etc). They also work much better offline.

You can save a trivial amount of money by buying a cheap Chromebook, but you lose a lot of performance and capability.

I'm not saying that Chromebooks don't have advantages for some use cases, because clearly they do. However, they're not significantly cheaper than comparable Windows 10 laptops, which is where we came in....

Some smartphones surprisingly decent specs.

  1440 x 2560 pixels 
  Quad-core 2.1 GHz Cortex-A57
  3 GB RAM
  32/128 GB SSD
  And 2 cameras / other smartphone features.

But, they cost 2-3x what a netbook does.

Which laptop & smartphone CPUs are you talking about?

I haven't kept up with news lately. Could you post some links