That "crosh" shell is actually extremely limited, only allowing a handful of basic commands. (ssh, ping, traceroute, top, a couple of other misc utilities -- but no text editor.)
One missed in that article is chrome://system which brings up a bunch of hardware-related data. (For example, cpuinfo output. If you're wondering: Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N455 @ 1.66GHz.)
As other commenters have mentioned, a bunch of those work well in the Chrome Browser, too. (I'm on dev channel, 10.0.612.3)
In "about:flags" on Chromium (10.0.613.0 on OSX) there's an option to enable expose-style viewing of tabs by swiping three fingers down.. which is really convenient because swiping 4 fingers down is the default on Macs to invoke expose.
From there, you can open a terminal and start experimenting, installing outside software, and working on ChromeOS development.