As someone who's been looking for a first-class Linux experience on a mobile tablet for a while and been very underwhelmed by everything on offer, I'm pretty excited about this and am very curious how it compares with running Linux on the upcoming Slate. That said, the S4 is quite a bit smaller and lighter than the Slate and more what I'm in the market for though I expect the Snapdragon to be quite a bit slower than the x86 in Google's product.
So what is preventing OEMs from releasing a Chrome OS phone which runs both Android apps and desktop Linux apps out of the box without this Dex/Canonical vendor-specific solution?
As far as I know, the compatibility layer for running Android apps on Chrome OS is closed-source, which means that any OEM wanting to do this would need Google’s blessing and access to their source code. However, if there were a phone that did this, I’d buy it for sure.