I actually made a similar observation to this in high school, and promptly used what money I could to get myself a crappy netbook. (I also didn't really have that much disposable income back then, just what I made working retail)
An observation that I've made after using (a later, the first one broke) netbook with a conventional build versus the same netbook with a SSD is that with a hard drive, netbooks are painfully slow. Once you've swapped that for a really fast SSD, and stopped using Windows on it, it boots in 10-15 seconds and programs usually launch almost-instantaneously. I've found it to be almost as nice to use as my (much nicer and newer, quad core with a nice graphics card) desktop. There are exceptions to the 'almost as nice': flash doesn't work well, screen size is an annoyance sometimes, and you clearly aren't going to be doing much with CUDA. But considering it cost ~$550 with the SSD (which was almost as expensive as the netbook), as compared to well over $1000 for the desktop+screens, it's pretty awesome (and portable, too) for someone who doesn't always have extra cash (students don't have the best salary).
An observation that I've made after using (a later, the first one broke) netbook with a conventional build versus the same netbook with a SSD is that with a hard drive, netbooks are painfully slow. Once you've swapped that for a really fast SSD, and stopped using Windows on it, it boots in 10-15 seconds and programs usually launch almost-instantaneously. I've found it to be almost as nice to use as my (much nicer and newer, quad core with a nice graphics card) desktop. There are exceptions to the 'almost as nice': flash doesn't work well, screen size is an annoyance sometimes, and you clearly aren't going to be doing much with CUDA. But considering it cost ~$550 with the SSD (which was almost as expensive as the netbook), as compared to well over $1000 for the desktop+screens, it's pretty awesome (and portable, too) for someone who doesn't always have extra cash (students don't have the best salary).