I wrote about my experience while looking for a personal laptop in 2013: https://ashishb.net/tech/the-weird-state-of-laptop-industry/ Little has changed since then. There is still a considerable gap, and no one is building a developer laptop. What surprises me is the amount of energy Google is pouring into Chromebooks, they could have made an excellent (GCP-integrated?) developer laptop instead. For backend engineers to front-end engineers to mobile developers, it could have become the defacto developer machine - provided the Wi-Fi, battery, and sleep/wake-up handling is as good as Macbooks.

That said, I've been doing light webdev work on a Chromebook using Crouton (to run desktop Linux alongside ChromeOS, with seamless switching) and aside from difficulties with the MicroSD slot and apt-get on Ubuntu it's been quite nice. Getting solid, first-party Linux desktop app support would make Chromebooks a serious contender in the "cheap dev laptop for light work" space, and I think Google is working toward that.

Obviously, the hardware is going to preclude you from doing any serious heavy lifting, but I'm pretty excited to see what they come up with in another year or two. The battery life on these things is fantastic, plus some of them can also run Android apps.

Crouton installation instructions can be found here: https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton

A tip: while you can find ARM distributions of Linux distros and packages, it'll make your life much easier to get a Chromebook with an x86 processor.