It should also be mentioned that a Chromebook with disabled OS validation may be useful as a development machine, but it's certainly not something you would want to use on a day-to-day basis (or much less give someone without a technical background to use).

At least the new ones that don't have a physical switch require you to press ctrl-d on each boot (or wait a minute) while any other keystroke re-enables validation. You might imagine how inconvenient that can be.