The netbook idea worked fine for me! (And my current portable is an old Thinkpad X60, which might as well be a netbook.) As far as I could tell the low-end market just got sucked into tablets when the iPad came out. Maybe the economics will work out a bit better now that the tablet hype is over and we've gone through another couple of transistor doublings.
Apple was also better at making a low-end simple application-like computing device than assorted OEMs and Microsoft ever were.
Looking back, it's obvious that Microsoft dropped the ball on that one. They could have made iWindows for people willing to sacrifice power, flexibility and freedom for mobility, reliability and ease-of-use.
Which makes me wonder why Ubuntu didn't take off on netbooks back then. Even today, this market segment seems perfect for desktop Linux, but nobody is enthusiastic about shipping it.
