looks like you either love 'em or hate 'em. lol. I have an Emachines netbook, with Ubuntu, WinXP, Win7, and FreeDOS on it (gotta love GRUB), as well as partitions for AROS and Solaris when I get arouond to installing them. The lack of a cd-rom is a pain sometimes, but .iso mounting software along with a strange hack that can turn a u3 enabled thumb-drive into a bootable "cd-rom" (though a USB cd-rom would be a bit more sensible) has eased that. The really nice thing about it is the fact I can just fold it, grab it, and run off. The typing area is a bit small, but usable, and the Wifi makes it an ideal bail out of the house (with a noisy 3-year old), down the street, to the local café's hotspot machine. Oh, and UAE runs almost flawlessly on it (except for some weird sprite glitch that turns the mouse pointer into an ugly, Barney purple box. Probably a config thing somewhere) Not one to brag about x86 equipment, I actually like this thing. Not sure if Ubuntu's reduced overhead makes it more useable, but it responds really well. (winXP and 7 are on there for school, Grand Theft Auto, StarCraft (which works great with Ubuntu and WINE), and a few other games. Otherwise I'm always using Ubuntu. Haven't figured an excuse for freedos yet).
Though if watching DVD's is your thing, netbooks would really suck. You could do it by ripping the dvd to an iso, mounting it, and watching it, but that seems a bit more trouble than its worth (even to me).
Oh, the resolution works really well when using VNC from the Amiga! No need to scale/scroll/iconify/flip-back the window all the time so you can click behind it. Unless using AGA/ECS, those resolutions would still be a bit of a pain...