While I'm admittedly not a Mac fan, I find this laptop especially horrid, from a maintenance and tweaking point of view.

I've used dozens of laptops, and had a couple Sony Vaio's that gave me bad experiences about laptops without optical drives.

All laptops will fail, and some quicker than others, at very inconvenient times. The Vaio's that failed had external optical drives, but I had them stored away and didn't use them very frequently. When the laptops failed, I couldn't find the optical drives, so I couldn't restart the machines with CDs like Knoppix, UBCD, UBCD4Win, or even Win XP install CDs to try to fix the windows install.

I had to open up the Vaios to remove the hard drive (just like the MBA), took it out, slaved it to a desktop, to salvage the data. The lack of an optical drive readily available made it a pain in the rear. I also couldn't reinstall the OS without having to find the optical drives.

So those of you who think the lack of an optical drive is no big deal, make sure you organize your stuff better than I, and keep your optical drive in a safe place that you can get to easily. This seemingly trivial stuff is a real PITA when computer do go wrong.

I hope the bios of the MBA will allow booting from the external optical drive, as that will simplify the install of other OSs or disaster recovery media.

Bottom line though the MBA is a sweet notebook, but there are too many "workarounds" to handle the deficiencies that have been widely discussed here.