Another great hardware review, this one by Ian Betteridge:

The Pixel makes me feel that Google probably took one look around its own campus at the plethora of Macs people were using, despite all of them mostly using web apps, and wondered why there wasn’t a Chromebook which could tempt its own employees to ChromeOS. The Pixel is the answer to that — and also for people like me, who wants a good quality machine and are happy to pay a premium price for it. […]

But it’s also a statement about Google, too, because it says that Google can do hardware with the same attention to detail and quality that Apple does. It’s not a shot across Apple’s bows, but more putting a flag in the ground that says “Come on Cupertino, we can do hardware — you think you can do services?”