Your average computer scientist would have given his right arm and his first born for such a machine not all that long ago.
Sure qemu is efficient, but that little machine is plenty powerful in its own right. The fact that you normally don't actually use much of that power is why you can do this in the first place!
I'm usually taking my personal AspireOne on business trips. Our operations guy refuses to stock netbooks because they are "underpowered". And, at least once I had our contractor remark that it's impossible to work on such an underpowered machine - while it was happily rebuilding Linux kernel at that very moment.
The thing's so much lighter and compact than company laptops, it makes huge difference when you have to climb a 70m tower with it, or unfold it during 13-hour flight. And most typical tasks in personal computing are not resource-intensive at all.
But that's mostly due to software bloat and a memory hungry strategy, I'm sure you could do the same stuff with a much smaller machine if programmed more efficient.
I'd hate to travel with this rig :)
I deliberately use slower machines so that I write more efficient code!
Which is - I'll agree with you on this - rather ridiculous.
Practically every monitor in our office is of course matte. If they were glossy displays, we would really be struggling to read any text on them! Perhaps this is more of a problem for people like me who prefer white-on-black.
That's a good trick. Runners do something similar: http://www.nefitco.com/weightvestarticleuk.html