I haven't seen any suggestion that Chromebooks are somehow directly subsidized by Google - are Samsung, Toshiba, etc. getting some kind of kickbacks for making and selling the hardware? ChromeOS itself is free to license for vendors [1]
But most have fairly low-end CPUs, not much RAM, and small SSDs, so I don't think they compete with Apple for features, per se.
1:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromebook#Sales_and_marketing