I've been using my Toshiba netbook for two days and I love/hate it.
The keyboard is very unergonomic. Maybe that's the reason netbooks are not popular anymore.
To find software that supports i686 machines is harder than expected. What's the purpouse of high level languages if not abstract the machine? Also I have found *zero* modern web browsers available for i686. Dillo works great for non-js websites, which are not a lot, sadly. Anything based on webkit crashes and I should try to find out why.
TUI/CLI stuff works OK, of course (Now I'm tooting with toot-cli), which kinda makes this thing ideal for hanging out in tilde servers.
But in general, it feels very cool to not need more than 32bits addr space and 2 GiB of RAM to do stuff. Of course I don't need a supercomputer to read some toots and to read some email!