What is Chromium OS...?

Last week I installed the beta version of Googles new operating System on mac via VMware.
The installation was extremely fast; I initially thought I had done something wrong.

I booted it up and was confronted with a blue sign in screen that required a useranme and password... what bloody username and password? After an extensive google search (excuse the irony) I discovered I was required to enter my google account credentials and walah! I was in.

Now for some reason I expected to see a sleek desktop with a range of nifty google bells and whistles that the dudes at google would have knocked up, however I was shocked to be prompted only by a chrome browser with my gmail preloaded??
I then proceeded to look around and I quickly began to realise “wait a minute... this is just a google chrome web browser”.

Now I must admit initially I felt a little ripped off to have gone to all trouble of installing a new op sys and realising I could have achieved the same experience if I just simply opened a chrome the browser on my mac... However, I then began to realise that this is absolutely ingenious. Yes of course I went to all the trouble to install this thing but it quite literally took 5-10 minutes and it was FREE!

It made me question the concept “is a desktop really necessary”?
Is the way we will look at computing, a mere portal through which we access anywhere as long as you have a computer fast enough to run a web browser?
Is this the new way to look at personal computing whereby the model is reversed forcing the consumer to receive the experience of high end server processing to run ALL applications as opposed to high end client side processing?

I believe if you drill down into where google is heading with this idea, aside from all the obvious faults/question (mandatory net connection required, who owns the data etc), I believe the concept has merit possibly rendering web dev as a major if not the only player in the market in years to come.