An enterprising young programmer who goes by Hexxeh has packaged up a pretty straightforward way to run the Chromium OS (The Open Source version of Chrome OS) on your own laptop. The site has packaged up a bootable USB image to allow you to try the OS on your laptop without having to mess around with your existing OS install.
Check out this video about Retrode, which allows you to access video game cartridges and controllers via a USB interface. It is a textbook example of a hacker-friendly hardware: