I have got to give it to Asus, they’ve knocked themselves out. At $375 the Asus Eee 1000HE is an awesome NetBook. Acer has one that is a little cheaper and Dell has one as well, but the Asus is a serious notebook for not a lot of cash. You can swap out the drive with a solid state drive and bump up the RAM for still less than a MacBook is going to cost you starting out. I’ve been test driving the Eee, which by the way is the actual screen shot used on wikipedia’s NetBook article, and not only do I like the machine but I also like the feel of the keyboard. At less than three pounds, it’s light, and would be lighter if I’d just go ahead and spring for the SSD drive…
I’m not going to say the Eee is a rocket ship in terms of speed compared to my MacBook, but it runs Ubuntu really fast and runs XP as would be expected (I’m dual booting it).