> I have a hard time seeing how any Chromebook above $ 349,- could still survive in an post-MacBook Neo age.
I doubt there's enough of a market for the use case alone, but nice Chromebooks are perfect for travelling internationally - you can reset them before border crossings and quickly restore them after passing through border crossings where anybody is liable to ask for access to your devices.
Never thought of it, but conceptually, I could see the appeal for very privacy minded folks and those with heightened security requirements. Course, it's a question of thread profile whether one trusts Google and case dependent whether one can actually expect free and unrestricted access to a VPN for set up once they are in the country in question. Plus, you could just do this with any OS or laptop really, just use Tails or some other live distro. In any case, as you said, likely a small target market.
The trust venn diagrams I think aren't quite as bad as you describe - there are a ton of people with gmail accounts who implicitly start from a position of trust with Google, but I'd wager a lot of them wouldn't trust "border guard from a random country" to have unrestricted access to their personal gmail. They don't really need to care about VPNs either once across the border, https access to gmail.com is all they need.