Hello Johnny,
The version of flashrom which you are using is most likely encountering problems writing over portions of the ROM which is locked by the PCH management engine. Even if hardware write-protection is disabled, software running on the host CPU cannot access regions which are locked by the management engine.
We have a workaround implemented in the version of flashrom that ships with ChromeOS/ChromiumOS -- Basically it will ignore the portions of the ROM which the management engine locks. You can checkout the latest version here:
It's kind of strange that the touchpad didn't work... I haven't tried Ubuntu on the C7 personally, but I know others who have put other distros such as Arch on it without issues. It uses the standard PS/2 keyboard/mouse interface IIRC.