I am sorry, but I don't really understand the appeal of these netbooks. I have seen several dual core laptops with 2GB of ram on sale for 399.00. Why not buy this instead of a netbook?? It is much more powerful and has an optical drive and larger hard drive. Right now, the netbooks seem too limited in performance for the price you have to pay. If they were REALLY cheap, say 199.00 or so then they might be worth it.

I would look at the PC vs console price from 2 ways. Basically, nearly everyone needs a PC these days. Since you need a PC anyway, I would consider most any decent midrange PC can be upgraded to play games at moderate settings and resolutions for approximately 250.00 (150.00 for a graphics card and 100.00 for a good power supply). Looking at things this way, PC gaming is somewhat cheaper than console gaming (marginal cost = 250.00), especially considering the games are 10.00 cheaper for the PC. However, if you want to go to high end gaming PCs, the cost is outrageous. The main problem I see with PC gaming today is that most A list games come out on consoles first, and may or may not ever be ported to the PC, and even if they come to PC, the coding may not be well optimized.

I also wish they would make a Warcraft strategy game that was not massively multiplayer. I just dont want to get into that area at all, but liked the old world of warcraft cd game. However, let us be thankful that at least they are making games designed from scratch for the PC instead of making them for consoles first!!!! I also think it is great that most of their games scale well to less powerful computers.