Naturally, one of our services crashed during my second day away (this service had been running flawlessly for 3 years prior). So I spend a bit of time using the tiny cheap laptop.
To my surprise, the tiny laptop was refreshingly nice to work with. There is something elegant about a tiny little fanless machine that you can just throw in your backpack without any worries (unlike with my multi-thousand dollar portable workstation).
The keyboard on this particular laptop was actually very nice, though the screen and trackpad are just utter crap. Though the screen was small and low resolution, it was just fine for email, some SSH sessions and light browsing.
Anyway, long story short: I am now looking at buying a small, fanless laptop with a decent trackpad and screen. The StarLite would be a good contestant.