It depends a lot on what you want to do with it and on your budget... if you're planning on doing a lot of work in MS Office type stuff--or any real work in Photoshop/Illustrator/etc. you're going to want to get a "real" laptop and spend real money on it.
If your travel laptop is just a companion for leisure trips that you use to write e-mail, get information, watch movies and post a few pictures online, a Chromebook will suffice. Chrome OS is much less resource intensive than Windows, so a $200 Chromebook sucks a whole lot less than a $200 Windows laptop.
There are some seriously nice "ultrabook" laptops out there in the $1000 range--I recently replaced an ancient MacBook with a Dell XPS 13 and love it. But on short leisure trips I'm just as likely to toss the $150 Chromebook covered in stickers in my bag--after all, Google Maps is just as usable on the crappy Chromebook screen, and if I drop it or spill beer on it, I'll be a lot less sad.
If you have the money and are willing to cart around $1000+ in hardware, absolutely go with the XPS/Thinkpad/etc. If you don't or aren't, there are perfectly usable Chromebooks that can be had for $200, but the Windows machines at that price point are hot garbage.