I wish this was a good thing. This very well could be the first big mistake in jobs absence.
Why? Because, one of the following needs to be true:
1. The product will seriously compromise (cripple) OSX.
2. The product will not compete (price wise) with other netbooks.
3. The product will not do 1 or 2, and will destroy sales of the appropriately priced apple laptops.
No matter what, as an investor and developer, this will be awful for the company.
Your #1 is completely false. I have a Dell mini 9 with a complete 10.5 install on it and it runs wonderfully. Every feature. It's better than my dad's 933mhz G4 iBook, and at least as good as my sisters 12" 1.25ghz G4 PowerBook.
The OS (finder, spotlight, etc) is responsive, applications load fast, expose, dashboard, and spaces work instantly and smoothly. Frontrow is AWESOME on it - lets me wirelessly grab my whole iTunes video library in a keyboard friendly, full screen interface. It has enough power to playback my DVD resolution h264 encoded movie files and scale them to screen resolution.
It launches iWork '09 apps as fast as my iMac does, and the apps run great on it (it's a little slower to create a new file after you launch and pick a template - SSD write speeds being what they are). MS Office '08 runs like a champ as well.
I did a 3 hour video chat with my Mom (she virtually attended my sons first birthday party) on a single charge. That means running the webcam, encoding the video transmitting it via wifi, receiving her video stream wirelessly and decoding it onto the screen. For three hours on a 42kwh battery.
It sleeps and wakes instantly, cold boots in under 40 seconds, shuts down in about 20 seconds. It'll drive a 20" LCD via VGA if screen space is an issue. Works with Apple BT keyboard and mouse, if you need though.
In short, there is honestly no compromising OSX on this computer for the tasks that 90%+ are buying MacBooks for.
Netbooks are the happy meal toy of portables. Regular people love them, but for more involved computer centric professionals and enthusiasts they are utter HELL. I'm not sure why anyone aside from a kid or net junkie (a sizable market) would want one.
Tablets are the way to go. They need a letter/legal sized device which is very light and can recognize hand writing while being able to hook up to peripherals and do a wide range of application support.
Yeah, the use of touch screen would have to be a computer with a different position on a table. That's obvious. But, so what? A Cintiq exists and is highly popular...with those who can afford it. If Apple finds a way to make the screen go up and down allowing for a regular keyboard when needed, it will be a success.
I would think that would be likely. My hope is to be able to use Photoshop (or a limited version of it) on a legal sized tablet with stylus recognition... might be a big old pipe dream. You are most likely on target with a tablet that can run enough OSX and have enough function to run Apple productivity apps, minus high power video/sound apps.
OK, I work for a large IT department (we support 50,000+ users with 70,000+ machines). I work with all techs and tech managers. I'm the 3rd person to buy a netbook in my office, there's 2 more awaiting delivery, and at least 2 or 3 more considering.
Almost all tech people I know love their netbooks. They can have a laptop - not a smartphone or balckberry - with them almost anywhere without lugging around a big, heavy computer. They can put them on a users desk to grab files test some piece of hardware without displacing the users junk.
Tablets on the other hand are about as useless as can be. Designed for one handed use but, when you factor in a usable battery, heavier than a ream of paper so you gain nothing. The tablet form factor has been tried and tried and it never catches on because it's useless, except for very specific, usually very fixed installations (in cars for example). Smartphones are the logical replacement for the tablet design, netbooks are simply notebooks for people who like to travel light and move a lot.