As you may have heard, Google has its first shop-floor presence — not in California as you’d expect, but around the corner from PC Pro, inside PC World on Tottenham Court Road in London.

So this morning I wandered over to take a look and take some photos. Obtaining permission for this latter task from this particular branch of the PC World empire proved a challenge, but that left me lots of time to eavesdrop on customers trying out the web-only machines.

This first ever Google store — or Chromezone, as it’s called by them but never again by me — features a dozen devices, laid out on shiny blue curved counters, with oddly shaped stools to perch on while having a play. If this is Google’s answer to the Apple Store, or even the Microsoft Store, it needs a new designer. Not only did the space have the colour-theme of a child’s playroom, the lone staff member spent a fair amount of time wiping down fingerprints from the myriad shiny surfaces.

Aesthetic complaints aside, the shop-in-a-shop certainly drew attention from customers. And it’s a good idea: I doubt many of PC World’s usual shoppers would trade in a Windows laptop for a Chromebook without having a go on one first.

But down on the front line in the retail battle — as in, the shop floor — Google has handed the difficult task of explaining its revolutionary new device to one lone PC World staff member. The girl tasked with this in the TCR branch certainly knew her stuff, but what a hurdle to overcome.

One lady asked about using Office, and was given a wonderful sales pitch about Google Docs. Another wasn’t clear on the difference between 3G and Wi-Fi, and frankly, didn’t likely care. This is the web — it should just work, right? (Walking back, I reflected that the Kindle 3G is the only device, aside from smartphones and some tablets, to really get this always-on connection right; but apparently Amazon has now abandoned that, and is banning browsers from accessing the web via 3G on the new devices.)

Some customers clearly knew about the device, but still weren’t buying (not when I was there, at least). One asked if Chromebooks came with an Ethernet port, as his home Wi-Fi gets wobbly. Nope. He wandered off to the non-Chromezone (the rest of the store) and was last seen eyeing up Windows laptops.

When this poor sales girl’s colleagues need to make a sale, I’m guessing they get questions about the specs, battery life, price — easy questions to answer. The shoppers are already sold on the idea of a laptop. The Chromebook saleswoman needs to convince them to give up Windows and flip to the cloud, while explaining the finer points of connectivity, offline access and more before she’ll make a sale.

Google is right to get people looking at Chromebooks. PC World’s customers seemed excited to be looking at something new: some took photos, many sat down to try the Chromebooks out, and quite a fair few asked questions. But the potential deal-breakers in the product won’t be overcome by a bit of shelf space — no matter how many times you get staff to wipe the fingerprints off it.

From a marketing point of view, it’s an obvious message for Dixons to be pushing. But in reality, as we all know, one of the great merits of Windows 7 is that most of us don’t need a new PC to run it. I use it happily on an old Advent laptop with 1GB of RAM and a Pentium Dual-Core processor; David Bayon runs it on his Atom-powered Samsung NC10 netbook. If there was ever an edition of Windows that didn’t mean “time for a new PC”, this is it.

With Microsoft getting so much right in Windows 7, it’s a disappointment to see it permitting (perhaps even supporting) such a misleading marketing slogan. And I think it’s a mistake. In the coming years Windows is going to be increasingly threatened from multiple directions — by a buoyant Apple, by emergent operating systems such as Chrome OS and by cloud-based mobile computing. Surely as the battle grows Microsoft will want its best foot forward, in the shape of a satisfied user base. The last thing it will want is to be weighed down by still-lingering resentments over Vista.

Yet this slogan seems designed to deliver precisely that outcome. Dissatisfied customers won’t appreciate being told they must write off their old PC to escape their unsatisfactory OS. Many who can’t afford a new PC will stick with Vista and remain disgruntled with it. And those who know the truth – that any machine that runs Vista will run Windows 7 better – will resent Microsoft’s apparent collusion in an attempt to get them to waste money on an unnecessary new PC.