No, definitely not. Keep in mind, I am not "for" the widespread use of Bay Trail as a Haswell Celeron/Pentium substitute. I think the move was a year premature.
One thing they could have done since they have complete control over the naming due to them owning the trademarks is this.
To use the name celeron or pentium
the exact same cpu in desktops, notebooks, and tablets in
oem machines.
have to follow these rules
- The computer's total volume must be below X cubic centimeters
- The computer must have a storage system where X MB/s random speeds, and Y MB/s write speeds are obtained.
- The computer must have a certain minimum memory system
If the oem company can't not meat these benchmarks then they can't get the celeron or pentium sticker on their box and they can't market the cpu as celeron or pentium in advertisements. Instead the cpu defaults to the name "atom"
It is the same stuff that Intel did with the centrino line and the ultrabook line. This types of rules do accrue a small cost to the oems and thus the users, but intel can make a marketing fund to cover up the costs to the oems. There is much good that can be done by such tactics. Furthermore Intel can use such tactics for evil saying you must use an intel ssd, intel/crucial flash, intel chipsets which have no effect to the end user, intel wireless cards, etc.
Intel has the power of great good, or the pure evil shit. AMD has the same power but it is lesser powers for their marketing power is less, and they have less well established brands.
Now these type of marketing
only works on the margins. It can convince a person to spend $10 more, $20 more in rare cases $50 or a $100 more but it will never convince a person to spend $150+ more and this is why the ultrabook initiative was a failure for at the time those ultrabooks cost much more in the area of $200+, sure they were better computers than craptops but when they cost as much as a mac people will go to the mac for the mac has a more powerful brand image then a recently created word such as intel ultrabooks. Furthermore I do not think the term ultrabooks was the best, possibly probooks or something if the cost was going to be so much more, and then a lesser term for the consumer line which had less rigorous tech requirements.
Yes they can if they are configured to the right screen (tv, an ips netbook, an ips notebook, etc), the right price, the right software, and the right cloud/network storage. Google is pushing this dream for they provide the right type of skills to take benefit from it, they make money off the cloud and knowing how to sell advertisements. Thus they can push free software that is good enough for they make their money in other ways.
In other words Google has the right talents and the right weaknesses to make that dream into a reality.