I haven't tried dual booting but the nice thing about having debian in a chroot is that I can easily switch back and forward between ChromeOS and XFCE. Plus I'm guaranteed that all the hardware is fully supported. When I have encountered an issue with crouton, it's a sufficiently small project that you can hack up the scripts to work around stuff. David Schneider, who maintains the crouton project is also very responsive to any issues that are reported.
I have used crouton to install Debian with xfce on my Samsung Chromebook. It's a bit on the slow side compared to my Macbook Pro running Ubuntu but the lack of a fan makes it an awesome little machine. I just wish that there was a version of the Pixel with an arm processor inside.
WebKit is a great technology but we really need viable alternatives such as Gecko as used in Firefox to guarantee a healthy future for the web. The situation ten years ago where most websites targeted IE 6 led to a stagnant period in the history of browser and web technologies. The past few years have seen enormous progress directly as a result of the competition between Firefox, Chrome, Safari and even IE. It would be sad if we were to return to a browser monoculture. It makes me sad that Apple and Microsoft restrict the development of third party browsers for their phone OS's. I would love to be able to use Firefox on iOS just as I can for Mac OSX. Mobile Safari is great but the risk of web developers ignoring standards and targeting mobile websites at WebKit alone is worrying. I have a more detailed argument at http://compile-link-run.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/why-john-grub... and would be interested in hearing what others have to say.