The sub-$500 price tags make current netbooks relatively cheap in my mind, and potentially disposable should the technology improve significantly in the coming months.  Much harder to call a $1500 computer “disposable”.

Most of what I would want to do with a netbook is pretty much what you should expect to do on a netbook: surf the web, send email, open documents and spreadsheets, and maybe some very lightweight development — which is, for me, typically Linux-based work.  Email and web can already be done well in a browser.  More of my own docs and spreadsheets are in a browser now, too, by using Google Docs.

And, hell, from what I can tell, Google’s “Chrome” web browser (along with its suite of web products) is the play for making the browser more important than the operating system.

It might be time to start taking a closer look at these.