No, the "real" ChromeOS has had acceleration all along. It is about the Chromebooks getting HW acceleration for its virtualized Linux environment when you want to run real Linux apps on it.

Thank you, now I understand the other comment here about the implementation using virtualization - i felt i was missing a kernel/host in that explanation - Linux running under Chrome os makes more sense :)

There is no so much HW acceleration required for canvas, CSS layouts and WebGL 2.0, versus OpenGL 4.6, OpenGL ES 3.2, Vulkan, Metal, DirectX 11/12 are capable of.

So I guess now they are getting big boys HW acceleration.