Yeah, I have actually. That was 32 years ago, when you could etch boards at home and mount thru-hole DIP components in your shed. No idea if Woz etched the boards himself, but ferric chloride was always cheaper than LSD.
Sorry, but computers in 2008 are significantly more challenging to produce from scratch.
My assumptions when I made my assertion that this isn't something that can be done at a kitchen table:
- A design for a $200 touch screen web tablet is pretty much going to require a custom PCB.
- The design of that board would more than likely be a repackaged and licensed board from the cpu/chipset manufacturer, and it's not something you do in a hobbyist's workspace - you need CAD.
- You would likely not even design it yourself, you'd spec the physical, heat and electrical goals to the manufacturer and have them do it.
- Even if they were working from engineering samples and rigged up bits of gear hooked together with wire-wrap wire, proper low power and low cost components require exotic connectors and/or exotic soldering, and they just aren't available without commercial agreements.
- I assume they're going to need a processor architecture other than x86 to meet the price point (i think an Intel Atom or a Via + chipset would be approaching $50 in commercial quantities) - and I doubt anything off the shelf is going to do what they want it to.
Having said all that, some kind of mini-itx board with an atom or via processor, or a gumstix or something - and a discrete (say usb?) touch screen and lcd on an LVDS would approximate hardware-wise what they'd be likely to be building.