I bought one of these HP Streams the other week and am very happy with it - but I only wanted something I could write on during my commute, using specific writing apps not available on Chrome.
Keys feel fine to type on, mousepad is a little spongy but you can tweak the sensitivity so it's not too grievous.
Fine for browsing the internet and writing on - but little else. Once windows and Scrivener are installed, I have around 2gb of hard drive space left. So not useful if they want to put photos and music on there.
Finally, in spite of moans I'd seen online, you can update to Windows 10 without any storage issues (or I did, at least). Not sure if MS patched it to fix the issue or what (essentially there wasn't enough hard drive space to update from 8 to 10)
Also, you might need to buy a sub for Office 365 (or 1 TB cloud storage, which gets you Office 365 free). So that's £60 odd quid a year. You might be able to fit a full version of Office on there, but I don't know, I haven't tried.
It's a dinky little thing and I like it.