But for college ...... what on earth could any student need that isn't amply fulfilled by a netbook?
I personally use a netbook at Uni, but have a regular desktop at home which has dual 20" LCDs attached.
However most students I've encountered, the laptop is their only PC, and as a guess 95% are running either Windows or Mac OSX. (In my programming classes, only 3 studets out of 96 are running Linux).
Mind you, I go little overboard with my netbook, as it's currently running Arch Linux as the host OS (which on boot, into GUI w/GNOME only consumes 87MB of RAM), and then run Windows 2003 in a VM (VirtualBox) to run Visual Studio 2010, IIS, etc for my two prgramming classes. At which it does a very good job at.
When in Linux, I'm only really using Firefox, OpenOffice and Lyx most of the time. Occasionally I'll start FreeMAT (a MATLAB clone) to do some math stuff. The only games I have installed on the netbook are the ones that come with GNOME, Pingus and Warmux. All of which perform fine on my netbook.
Newer netbooks are not that much faster than the previous generation ones. The only exception are the few running the Atom N550 CPUs. (which are dual core, vs single core w/hyper threading).
PS. I'm running an Asus 1001HA netbook.