atom processors are great for the person that needs maximum battery power and is only doing email/general office/web.
For one most gaming video cards kill the battery efficiency of any laptop. The dual video options today are a nice deal.
I feel really bad for the people that went whole hog into a netbook and bring it to me because it's "never ran right and much slower than my old laptop".
My Atom 330 netbook was slllooowww out of the box. It had so much crap on it from Asus task manager listed something like 75 processes running. I immediately did a complete reinstall with Win 7 Enterprise... now it's snappy and doesn't bog down. Atom can be good, at least the dual core variety, pending the machine is setup right.