If you have a windows desktop on your lan, using RDP via the chromebook does okay in a pinch... when I used mine, I'd typically have several SSH windows, and an RDP connection open. Worked really well for me. Though I really wanted VPN, and the ability to run VMs, so broke down and bought a new MBP (my prior one was stolen).
It's basically just a web browser with some tweaks for convenient offline Google Docs. You can unlock a full shell and download some decent editors (Caret is one that I've used), if you want to do JS or Python development. Unfortunately the third-party package manager ("chromebrew") does not have a very robust offering, so you're pretty limited in what you're able to do. You can try building binaries yourself but you'll need to build your toolchain as well.
It is not going to run Visual Studio of course, but it is quite capable for browsing/videos/word processing/etc.