The Acer executives recently stated that US PC manufacturers will be dead within 20 years and that they want to “change the Microsoft-Intel environment” with Chrome OS, but now they are standing firm while everyone else races to do a tablet.

At least that is the word from Acer Taiwan president Scott Lin, who told Digitimes that while Acer can certainly produce a tablet device, it does not fit into the company’s business model. What is more, he qualms that other companies can simply copy Apple’s hardware and succeed and instead, Acer’s going to focus on ultra-thin laptops – a category Acer expects to account for 20-30 percent of its business this year.

Lin also stated that Acer will introduce some new models that are less then 2cm (.7 inches) thick - assuming there is an ARM-based Chrome OS netbook in that blend; we can certainly see the super thin and light laptop category and the tablet category aligning as direct competitors in the near future.