Of course it won't be stellar at multi-tasking nor will it run the latest, graphics intensive games but for most other tasks the Atom processor does fine, it's pretty close in performance to a P4 in a less power hungry package.
I agree that its the performance of a Pentium 4 but at like 13 watts which is what my 1.66Ghz runs at. I ran a benchmark on my netbook and it matched equally in processing power to that of a Pentium 4 2.53Ghz, but just like you stated at a drastic fraction of the power of a power hungry Pentium 4.
My netbook is the following: Toshiba NB205-N210 with Intel Atom N280 1.66Ghz ( which shows 2 cores, but the second I believe is just Hyperthreading just like a Pentium 4 HT) :
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834114665The biggest reason for buying this back in November 2009 was because it was advertised as lasting up to 9.08 hours on a full charge and at the time I just landed a gov job and was flying all over the place to get my required certifications and nothing stinks worse than being at an airport for a long layover and no outlets in sight to power a large laptop to that gets only 2 hrs of battery life use out of. So I would travel with my large gaming laptop and my netbook in the same computer bag. Ever since swapping the HDD with a SSD I have run it for almost 10 hours with my power config set to very green, underclocking the CPU when at idle and telling the display to shut off the backlight when idle for more than 5 minutes.
The only problem with travelling with 2 laptops is that the TSA raise a brow sometimes as it being an oddity and they grab both laptops off to the side to further inspect them and take a cotton swab to them to test for nitrates and other explosive material residue etc to see if they are actually bombs concealed as laptops etc. And my Gov ID doesnt work as an easy pass with the TSA, they can be as thorough as they want to be no matter who you are and no matter what gov info you show them etc to show them that your a good guy. But I am glad that they check everyone the same for my safety.
As far as:
Poor netbooks. They are always put down.
I have nothing negative to say about mine.
Its great for what its capable of, but you will definately run into problems if you are using it for the wrong application such as gaming or watching streaming movies etc. Successful apllications would be programming, writing ( typing up ) papers, email, web surfing, and running Perl scripts on it such as one that generated URL paths to mine information from parsing web pages etc. The most complex game that runs on it is Diablo 2, but more modern similar games like Torchlight dont run well.
For mine to watch movies I have to run them in 360p or as a smaller window and not full screen or else I end up with perfect audio and snap shots that update once every 3 or 4 seconds of whatever is happening in the movie etc, although oddly enough local AVI videos etc will run perfectly fine on it. I think this is because of the data assembly process of the streaming video packets that have to happen as part of the streamed video. If there was a way to say I want to watch a movie from netflix and allow the netbook to fully cache the movie locally and then play it, it would have all of its processing power available to play the movie vs maintain handshake to netflix and assemble the video quickly and then play it to display with the weak integrated video which is also part of the Intel Atoms APU ( CPU + GPU ) in a single chip, so when the CPU portion of the APU is busy, the GPU portion of the APU falls behind.
Bad applications for one of these is expecting it to play modern games on it. Mine even chokes up with Facebook games like slot machines where the GPU cant simulate the dials rolling and so the game lags out when the dials are spinning and the game becomes responsive again when the dials stop to put in another virtual coin etc and pull the virtual handle again. While other games that are more web based that you make a decision and the decision is handed off to the server and the server handles the processing power of what happened and returns the clients browser with the end result such as a Battleship type game of HIT or MISS with a user interface that is just an updated picture showing misses and hits, the netbooks Intel Atom handles it very well, since its pretty much no different than surfing a web site with a search engine and the search engine coming back with results.
I have even set my power settings to maximum performance to see where it made a difference and it just meant that the display stayed on all the time, the clock didnt throttle but stayed 1.66Ghz all the time and battery life dived down to like 4.5 hours.