I've tried both options. I've hackintoshed a msi wind and a lenovo ideapad, both netbooks.
Netbooks have great portability, generally have nice, bright LED backlit screens, and hellacious wifi reception. I'm personally a fan of the lenovo due to it's mini thinkpad form and build quality.
I'm currently using a 1.5 ghz last gen 12" g4 powerbook for my throw in a bag, lug around the house to surf, email and write documents. Personally, I prefer the pb, assuming it's maxed out a 1.25 gigs of ram.
PB has better screen for my purposes (10" widescreen is not wide enough for me), nice scrolling trackpad with two finger right click, optical drive, bluetooth, and a positively luxurious keyboard compared to any netbook, save possibly the dell mini one. Scrolling aside, the postage stamp sized trackpads do not compare.
I can also upgrade my software with impunity. Depending on what installation method you use with a netbook, a numbered update (10.5.6 to 10.5.6) may break several parts of your hackintosh install. Hackintoshes have minor issues with hardware components: the wind's camera may not work depending on which version you get, and the lenovo's wired ethernet doesn't work under osx. In addition, my lenovo has a jumping cursor issue that I haven't been able to fix, at least one other person has reported the same issue.
My pb has a discrete 64 meg video card, netbooks generally use gma 950 graphics or some variant of intel integrated graphics. The gma 950 uses 64 megs of your main ram for graphics. I believe the general rule is that, all other things being equal, an discrete graphics chip has better performance over an integrated graphics card with the same ram.
Netbooks may or may not have better batteries. Many first gen netbooks like the wind and lenovo only have three cell batteries, which equate to roughly 2 1/2 hours of light use (NO VIDEO). My pb batteries get roughly 3 1/2 to 4 hours of the same use. And if you're good at scrounging, you may be able to find batteries and power adapters for a pb on the cheap.
Again, I like the powerbook. I type a lot, and the keyboard is hands down (get it?
) better. I like the screen and the trackpad much better as well.
If I already had a powerbook or late gen g4 ibook, I'd stick with it after maxing the ram and possibly upgrading to a speedier and bigger HD.
If you already have a boing boing recommended netbook, or could get one on the very cheap on craigslist, and just wanted it to screw around on the internet for an hour or two at starbucks, that could be a valid option as well. With a little extra effort, netbooks can dual boot into xp or windows7 with no performance hit. (Virtual pc on a ppc is, well, painful.)
If you're wanting to use either one as a primary machine and do intensive tasks, like encode videos, forget about it. Good luck on your decision.
