I'd be amazed if anyone buys enough laptops from the plethora that are on the market to be able to give a balanced overview of whats good and whats not. Reviews are the way forward and I find the
The Register Hardware Reviews to be fairly comprehensive.
The only laptop/netbook I've bought in the last ten years I tweeted you about, but got my wife earlier this year an HP DM1, keyboard is 92% of normal size (and small keyboard is most people's gripe with netbooks, certainly hers) but its still very slim/small and battery life is good (plus it came with some weird "7" OS on it that I wasn't allowed to remove).
She loves it and has been very happy, its had no problem connecting to home/any wireless network, powerful enough for browsing/word-processing/presentations/etc.. Not tried with photo/video editing, but then you wouldn't be considering netbooks if you were wanting to do this sort of stuff seriously (as you already know so I'll stop trying to tell you how to suck eggs).
