Buying Chromebooks for their Hardware, not their OS

I'll ask here, as I don't wanna look for a newsgroup or irc channel or join a forum. Besides, doesn't Jeff post here, occasionally? Anyway, this bodhi on a chromebook idea looks pretty good. I like it cuz it has a lotta multimedia programs I can use and doing serious multimedia on my slackware desktop, while entirely possible, is jes too exhausting to implement. I jes have a couple questions.

Since bodhi is placing itself as a great replacement OS for chromebooks, can I safely assume all the hardware interfaces will be fully functional? Like the touchpad, F keys, IO ports, etc?

Also, like ubuntu, I see bodhi does not lend itself well to compiling software packages not in the bodhi app corral. This is most troubling, as I MUST have emacs, if only because "vi is the heart of evil!" Also, must have slrn. How does one deal with such a monstrous state of affairs? IOW, is it possible to somehow install gcc, suport libs, etc? Howzabout via apt-get, the debian pkg mgr?

I'm not a rabid linux distro bouncer and having had only a glancing experience with ubuntu and debian (rPi noob), this will be a learning experience. ;)

I believe that besides the unique content provided by the distribution Bodhi also uses the repositories of the latest Ubuntu LTS release. That means that it's quite easy to install gcc and libraries. The easiest first-step is probably:

Of course this availability of Ubuntu LTS software also means that some version of emacs is available in the repositories. In my experience there's generally not much disadvantage to using an emacs release from two years ago.