It's a lot better than a netbook, something short of a full laptop like an MBP. The SSD makes a big difference; the main shortcoming of my CR-48 was the poor GPU integration. I think it is priced at bit high, though. The problem of the Chromebooks is that the market for them is being cannibalized by tablet devices, not least the Android ones, several of which are excellent. The Asus Eee pad comes with a rather nifty dock that provides the usual keyboard+hub functionality and has extra battery built in as well.

a more general problem that no reviewer seems to have commented on: netbooks where you browse the internet most of the time derive little from their horizontal aspect ratio, because so many web designers insist on formatting for 800-pixel widths or the like, so that your netbook has 30-40% of the screen devoted to whitespace. A vertical format is considerably more useful for anything except spreadsheet work.