Re: resolution up to 2560 by 1700
I have a similar feeling regarding 10" tablets (e.g., Nexus 10's resolution) or 5" phones (Galaxy S4 rumoured to be full HD). For web browsing, there seems little point. For watching videos, you can't even fit a single Blu-Ray quality file into a 16GB device (and streaming would quickly eat up most people's monthly data allowance) so either people watch lower resolution anyway, or have high resolution encoded at low quality which defeats the point. For playing games, there's the issue of the extra strain on the GPU (which are typically far below PC graphics cards) - and I think games on mobile devices are far more restricted by storage space (high end meshes/textures take lots of space, typically these games require about 1GB, so you can't install too many of them - leaving most games to have much simpler graphics).
Meanwhile, laptops designed for productivity get stuck at 1366x768, unless you spend a lot more money...
At least this is a laptop though - maybe Google do intend to push Chrome more into productivity use (albeit with HTML5). Even now, it does support offline applications. Perhaps it'll give a kick to laptop specs in general, for those wanting to run Windows or (GNU)Linux.