Let me guess—you’re in the US, right? Did you know that the US accounts for less than 10% of netbook sales? And that Linux s shipping on 20% of netbooks worldwide?

Forgive my ignorance. Moblin is a yet another Linux distro Does Moblin have Atom specific drivers? If so, then Intel will surely sell more Atoms, if not more 945 (or whatever) chipsets.

Perhaps Intel would rather make something else than 945's? Something like, maybe, millions and millions of x58 and the chipset for the Nehalem Xeon? I'd love to see the market just flooded with Nehalem & it's chipsets.

So far everyone I know who's bought a "Netbook" chose XP over Linux, as it runs their software out of the box and is a platform they understand.

Sure, some Linux folk will want Linux on their PC; but most of them will want their preferred distro installed anyway.

As for ARM, if they understand the issue most folk are only interested if their machine is x86/x64 compatible. That way they can run all the software they're used to. I know I want all my boxes to be x86/x64.