I have the Eee too. Very cool. That said, I'm thinking of installing Debian on mine.
Funnily enough I spent Sunday trying to get rid of something on eBay as well and recently bought a Eee.
It's very nice, the screen could be a bit larger and the battery life longer, but it'll be dead handy for giving a lightning talk next time.
You just need a smaller Vaio, like mine which is still fast enough for me. On the smaller side, some day I'll probably pick up a Nokia N800.
Ehi, I'm looking for a N70, give it to me! What do you mean, you don't ship abroad? Come ooooon! B-P
A smaller Vaio - yeah and that would only cost six times the price of the eee!
Shipping to Italy?? That's almost as bad as Nigeria I hear 
I don't know if I'd consider the Eee's GPL issues the result of incompetence; I'd say that's about perfectly average for handling anything with Linux pre-installed. The usual course for companies to take when this happens (it's happened a lot with wireless routers with Linux firmwares) seems to be:
1. Claim that putting up source code is unnecessary, or whatever is up is enough.
2. The end, unless the company receives enough bad press or letters from lawyers, then go on to step 3.
3. Claim that the OS was developed by another company and you don't have source code.
4. Receive some more bad press and letters from lawyers.
5. Put up a tarball of some developer's home directory, missing a few files and depending on several custom tools nobody has ever heard of, usually of an older version than is actually shipping, but with enough of the important source code that the complaints stop.
6. Release a new product 2 months later, go back to step 1.
I'm sure that the Eee is popular enough that the process won't stall at step 2, and the stuff that comes out in step 5 is always enough that custom drivers, etc. will be possible, so I wouldn't worry too much about it. But if you send a (polite) email to Asus asking them to please provide you with full source code once you're a customer, it will help speed up the Linux folks getting the source code and will probably result in better drivers and better choices of OSes.
Still, I wish companies would stop pirating Linux. I know that it takes time and planning to provide source code, but that planning should be taking place before a product hits the shelves, not after. It's like a company putting off budgeting for royalties until after a product is selling well.
Well, my little Vaio SRX-87 cost $1000 refurbed from Sony, but that was many years ago. A while ago used SRX-87's on eBay were $600.
If you want a new, small Vaio there's this little guy. Very cute, but a little too small I think.
Well the eee is just over $400 *new* and is exactly the right size in my opinion (although I would lose the speakers for a slightly larger screen - but the screen is big enough and so is the keyboard). I also like the idea of a solid state drive.
So for a more expensive device to tempt me it would have to be a similar size (no bigger and not much smaller), have a solid state drive and more memory/faster processor.
That Vaio is certainly nice - but nearly triple the price (and possibly too small).
Oh - and the eee lacks a 3G modem. I have a USB one but not sure if it will work.
Well, I actually do think the eee is interesting, and I hope it succeeds - but since I already have the Vaio, I'm not buying one.
What I'd like to see is near-instant boot up time. Besides money and size (and OS) that's one concern I have about the tiny Vaio. Even suspend/restore takes too long IMHO on my SRX-87.
Also, if the file system isn't optimized for flash, I have some performance and longevity concerns with MLC NAND flash (basically, both suck if there are a lot of small writes - see these for example Flash isn't living up to the hype and Flash Chance - and MLC NAND memory is typically specified for 10,000 write cycles).
OTOH, NAND flash has the potential for massive read speed ups by paralleling many dies (and companies are already working on this).
Commenting by HaloScan
