You won't get any arguments from me there because Apple don't have any systems to compare. They don't offer an sub-notebooks at all right now. I don't like the term netbook, too ambiguous. Though I think Apple will slaughter the netbook market with the iPhone. Which is just as silly to compare to a "netbook" as one is to a proper notebook.
I can agree on netbook being a lousy term, I can't agree with the rest though.
What most people do with a notebook is edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations, send email and browse the web. The great think about these new "netbooks" is that they can do all of that pretty much as well as a full blown notebook while at the same time costing 2-3 times less and weighing 2-3 times less.
Much as I love my iPhone (which is a lot), the only two things from that list that it is ever going to be very good at is browsing the web and dealing with my email. Yes the keyboard is unfathomably good, but that doesn't mean it is ever going to be good an editing/creating anything other than the most basic documents.
Which just goes to show how silly the netbook term is, because I don't think people are buying them to surf the web with any more than they would buy a notebook just to do that sort of thing.
The iPhone is of course good at a whole load of other things as well, such as: social networking, music playing*, listening to podcasts, todo lists, traffic info, mapping, calendaring, train timetables, looking up reference data, IM, BBC iPlayer, last.fm, geocaching, geo-enabled searching, photo browsing, on-the-go-gaming, news, ebook reading - which the notebook/netbook is far interior at doing.
* ignoring for a moment the appalling design of the iPod app, iTunes and all that goes with it
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