Macbook Air  

I agree with you...It looks good aesthetically, but in terms of specs, its definitely not as good...Its using a 4200rpm hard disk!! And without a CD/DVD reader....I don't think its worth USD$1799

Price is indeed a little high, not sure if the dollar weakness might have affected the imported prices.
MacBook Air is designed to students, which have nice discounts when buying, that also have to carry along many thick books and other stuff around the campus. So a very light laptop should help.
College campus are so networked that they are going wireless or WiMax so all students have access all over the campus. Plus most of the software is available on the network servers.
And not to say that with its Intel Core Duo, it can run Windows Vista or XP or Linux without a problem. So you can get 3 OS's in one small package for your convenience.

The Macbook Air is a bit pricey, but think again before saying it is not worth the money. I've used one myself and it is excellent! Need I say again? Superb! For a Core 2 Duo system and with 2GB of RAM DDR2 and such - The Mac OS version is remarkable! Here's why it is worth the bucks!

MacBook Air has black full-sized keyboard, LED backlit screen, built-in iSight camera and a trackpad which has multi-touch gesture support. By that it means you can set different gestures to correspond to different commands (scroll, zoom, delete, etc.). The Air uses Intel Core 2 Duo processors which has been shrinked down to 60% from its original size to fit inside the MacBook Air. According Intel's CEO, Paul Otellini, "The CPU is the width of a dime, the thickness of a nickel, and we didn’t think we could do it." They did.

The Air sports 1.8-in hard drives, USD 2.0, microDVI port and headphone jacks. It has Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR and 802.11n WiFi connectivity. What's missing with the MacBook Air? An optical drive. BUT, you can buy a separate bus-powered drive worth US$99. Apple also has a new software called "Remote Disc" which lets you connect to others computers' drives, even PCs. You get 5 hours of battery life when you're actively surfing the internet with the MacBook Air.

Of course there are great deals on PC Laptops - I'm still a PC fan and always will be, but the new Mac OS on this Air Laptop runs more stable than Windows Vista.

A rich man once said, Sell the people what they need and you make a little money. Sell the people what they want and you will make a lot of money.