Laura got her EEE today, so here's my impromptu review.

First of all, I have to mention the very worst thing about it, because it's something that will definitely affect everyone who owns one: the touchpad buttons are remarkably stiff. Did I say "remarkably"? I meant "ridiculously". It's like, hold the machine steady with one hand and press hard with the other. Or maybe press with both hands. Overall, I'd say they are more-or-less unusable. This means that you will need to leave touchpad tapping enabled or stick to the keyboard.

On the bright side, the touchpad itself works nicely. Two-finger scroll, clever click-to-drag features and some limited gestures in certain applications (OpenOffice and image viewers, mostly). If you can live with touchpad tapping then you won't have an issue with the buttons.

We spent about an hour with the default Linux install before overwriting it with the Ubuntu-EEE distro. I have to say this is a worthwhile upgrade. The Ubuntu-EEE project has done a stellar job with the interface. It's not your typical desktop (it's highly optimized for the small screen), it's more like a sophisticated device (e.g. cell phone or PDA) GUI. It's quite attractive and usable, even without any customization. The only real wart I noticed is that because it runs all windows full-screen, some dialogs can look funny (in particular I noticed a gFTP progress dialog that was pretty bizarre).

Speed-wise the EEE is pretty respectable for such a small machine. I immediately upgraded it to 2GB (yes, I happened to have a 2GB DDR2 SODIMM lying around), but even with 1GB it never seemed to bog down when launching applications. Even compiz works fine (although not with the default EEE GUI, only the traditional desktop).

It's got a nice list of features: 802.11n (although it seems to be connecting at 54Mbps on my home network, I've not yet tracked down why), bluetooth, webcam, two SSD drives (8GB and 32GB), VGA port, 3 USB ports, and an SD reader. Battery life seems on target at around 4.5 hours. It's only got one SODIMM slot, so keep that in mind if you decide to upgrade the RAM. The keyboard is decent. It's slightly cramped, but I had no problems typing, aside from having to adjust for the quirky location of a few lesser-used keys. Laura has small hands so she finds it perfect. The speakers are surprisingly good.

Overall we feel it was a good value ($449 from NewEgg after a $50 discount), although I remain baffled how the touchpad buttons ever made it past QA.