I have an Asus netbook with Windows 7 and Open Office, I added another gig of RAM from the 1GB it came with and it runs about anything I do. I mainly use it for travel, personal use for the Internet and email. I also load photos and look at them and often have to open attachments such as Word docs. All work pretty well. It is not a powerful computer, that is evident. 2 GB is all the memory that the Atom processor will address, so that is a limiting factor and the Windows 7 is a bit of a hog. My GF has the exact same model with Windows XP and it only has 1 GB of RAM and runs a little better than mine. The Windows 7 is what they call "Starter Edition", it has a few less features than a full version.
I will also say that you almost will need an external DVD or CD drive. I hook a standard DVD drive to mine via a special USB to SATA cable when I need to upload software and that works but is not too portable. Also, as others have mentioned, the video card is limited in it's ability to support real high resolution and larger aspect ratios.
I hope that helps

Same here, wife and I have been running a pair of ASUS netbooks as primary machines for about two years now. Upgraded ram to 2G and drives to 500G. Mine replaced the laptop I bought in 2002, 12" Dell Latitude C400 which is still in use and running fine.
I couldn;t find the Linux model an cheaper than the windows model so I had to buy the windows model then install my preferred distro myself. I run the normal openoffice, firefox, thunderbird, digikam, etc.
wife dropped hers and busted the display and I found one on ebay for ~$30 and swapped it.

Not sure about others, I don't buy a laptop for traveling away from home, even though I do use that capability. I buy a laptop so that I can move to other rooms in my house easily. Sometimes, I like to go out to the porch for an hour of so, or to watch my baby in the next room. The extra money for a laptop (over a desktop) is worth it to me.

This going to be a set up primarily a fixed workstation so that I can reduce some of the nerve problems while allowing for infrequent mobility requirements. I may have to wait for my son while he is in his classes, so I could knock out a little work in the dead time.