I've been saying something similar for the last year or so. I can immediately tell whether your software is well-written by running it on my netbook. I can play Team Fortress 2 and World of Warcraft pretty well, Adobe Fireworks runs like a dream, the entire Office suite is snappy.
And then you try something like Windows Live Messenger or Skype, who both somehow find ways to use more RAM and CPU than half of the games on my system let alone other applications. It is amazing to me how long it takes some websites to load, too - fast browser, fast internet connection, slow CPU, all adds up to a pretty miserable experience if you like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, GMail (is there ANY other website which has a loading bar?).
Quite a few netbooks on the larger end of the scale can run games. I'm on an HP/Compaq Mini 311c, Atom 260, ION, and 3GB RAM (I upgraded it). I made a post on Reddit explaining what I did[1] - bear in mind this is definitely a compromise, while it boosted one person's framerate from 20 FPS to 60 it bears more than a passing resemblance to Minecraft and 1997. TF2 is on the absolute edge of what I can play on here, but many games run perfectly fine with very few issues. However it's taken me 5 minutes to post this reply because every 20 seconds, textarea inputs on Firefox freeze and ignore anything I type for 10 seconds. Odd!
Running a netbook is very much a reminder that CPU speed is not a linear scale.
And then you try something like Windows Live Messenger or Skype, who both somehow find ways to use more RAM and CPU than half of the games on my system let alone other applications. It is amazing to me how long it takes some websites to load, too - fast browser, fast internet connection, slow CPU, all adds up to a pretty miserable experience if you like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, GMail (is there ANY other website which has a loading bar?).