While there will be people who love netbooks, and for good reasons, even Apple said they aren’t going into that market any time soon because on average too many people are disappointed with netbooks after the initial glow fades. They won’t go there unless they can make one “right” so that more people stay happy with them for longer.
Apple apps do not have a small processor footprint, and while people have Hackintoshed EeePCs to run Apple’s OS, it is pretty durn slow even with the 1.6mhz processors. Perhaps with SnowLeopard there might be enough speed improvements to consider making a netbook, or the other way around, using something like the iTouch’s OS to make a netbook.
The thing is, for Apple, a $300 computer just doesn’t make much financial sense for them - they already have them, they’re called iPhones and come with an AT&T contract. Why make a netbook when you already have a small format computer? In many ways, the netbooks that are out there are replacing the PDAs we used to lug around.
I mean, a T-Mobile G1 or an iPhone does much of what someone who uses a netbook might want, why reinvent the wheel?
I personally use it for video watching and whatnot, pulling television off of my BeyondTV and MythTV rigs, so the larger screen makes a very big difference in enjoying television. Not the same on an itty bitty low res touch screen phone, and for me, the netbook replaced a five year old Axim x51v.
As things progress, and community supported OSes expand further, it wouldn’t surprise me if they really expand the abilities of these netbooks as time goes on. The speed of the linux OS has gotten faster each time someone comes up with a new release, and as I said earlier, Windows 7 gives a similar to XP baseline. I really think that netbooks are here to stay.