How is it for speed? On my old low-end Dell netbook and desktop, I would get frustrated every time I did an "apt-get upgrade" or install as I waited what seemed like 10-15 seconds just for the "Reading package lists..." step to complete. On my MacBook Air this step is instant, which I attribute mostly to the SSD. I'm suspicious of regular hard drives now (though on the flip side I now only have a tiny amount of space).

Both CPU and HDD are bottlenecks, it's not a speed king. HDD is a regular 5400rpm one, the Celeron 847 1.1GHz is also rather slow. I used it for some Java + Scala compiling and it took significantly longer than on MBP (10 vs 2 minutes). Also, I was able to run FL Studio under Wine and it was capable of recording my MIDI playing in realtime for arpeggiated sounds, though it had problems with 4+ simultaneous channels. Keyboard is really bad. Otherwise for the price it's currently unbeatable in my opinion. For my purposes a large HDD was more important as I make a lot of photos and hence need a lot of storage. I use it while traveling in "less safe" countries, such as those in Latin America - I don't really care about losing it.