"A new generation of Chromebooks"... that are likely to not have any meaningful retail distribution in Australia, if past experience is to be any guide.
Any Chromebooks that have been available locally have been generally much lower spec versions than what have been available in the US. I don't know why Google Australia isn't doing more to increase their visibility locally?
Google barely sells them directly, they don't market them that much even in the US with the exception of a few devices.
As for the specs well honestly the "high end" Chromebooks are a joke, are you really going to buy a 1000-2000$ Core i5 Chromebook?
The CPU and RAM on these things doesn't matter that much for their use cases, even with the general purpose android repackaged apps it still wouldn't matter, what does matter is the storage and even the Core i5 models come with 32-64GB storage usually which is a joke.
I would have bought the chromebook pixel if it had an upgradeable SSD. You can use regular linux on them and the machine itself was great hardware in every other way (a friend had one). A macbook with 4-8x the storage was the same price, so it became an obvious choice. Once again, Google just didn't know their market...
Any Chromebooks that have been available locally have been generally much lower spec versions than what have been available in the US. I don't know why Google Australia isn't doing more to increase their visibility locally?