For £20 more for example you can get a laptop with a 1.8ghz celeron 1 gb of ram , 80gb hard drive, dvdrw and a screen you can see a whole web page on without scrolling
And probably a battery life of 30 minutes, and probably weighs 8 pounds.
The appeal of the Asus eee isn't in it's performance, but in it's portability (weight, battery life). If you want an inexpensive laptop that you can use for web-surfing, word-processing, e-mails, etc. wherever you go, the Asus eee pc can be really nice, from what I've read (I don't actually own it :) ).
Just don't make the same mistake I did: I bought a fairly high-powered (at the time) laptop which looked nice in specs and price, but I later found almost useless as a laptop - it just sat on my desk because it was simply too much of a pain to lug around for the battery life I got out of it.