I think you have spent far too much time wanting all purpose machines that you can bend to your will and use to create useful and or interesting things with.

The average consumer, and for this I might use myself, probably only does 2 things with an average computer. Check/write emails and watch or browse random shit. Neither of these require a lot of processing power, but battery life and portability are probably key. The amount of time i spend at home actually working with any kind of document creation is pretty much zero and really the amount of time I spend accessing documents is about the same. I really would not be surprised if this were true for most people. So really the ipad is pretty ingenious in design and marketing, it really hits exactly what most people want to do and it does it easily without really requiring much in the way of computer competency.

Though having messed around with one last night, a regular ipad mind you, while I was waiting for katy last night to get her book signed by The Oatmeal. I have to say that if I had money, which I don't, the mac Air is pretty damn sweet and bridges the gap between the ipad and a real computer so sexily. The start-up time and size and weight are impressive, battery life I don't know too much about but my father in law who owns one has been pretty happy. The price though is of course much more than the ipad.