I've got an ATI 780G board, and the HD3200 northbridge is gigantic! How on earth did they fit on into a netbook without adding 1 kilogram, putting out 1,000BTUs of heat and having a 6 minute battery life?

Well, you could call it a rounding error, but in my book (and wallet) 449 EUR is a bit less than 499EUR.
Still you might call this overpriced but if you get it at -20% rebate (=360EUR) as is often the case with an e-tailer things look much better then...

The Asus N10J with nVidia 9300M is around the same price, so that price is really not that surprising or high.

I bought a very lightly used secondhand Thinkpad X61 for mildly over 500 quid. The difference between it and a netbook is night and day.

6 hours battery life. 1024x768 screen. 2GHz Core2Duo with VT enabled. 802.11n. Decent keyboard. Supports 8GB RAM..

Netbooks should be small, cheap, with excellent battery life.

What is it with these netbook manufacturers?
The whole reason people buy and use netbooks is because they are small, light and cheap. They don't want to support Vista Aero (Hell, they don't even want Vista) and don't want to play 3d games. They want something to do a light bit of web browsing, some emailing and maybe a bit of word processing/spread sheet work.
The only choice you really want is the size of screen, size/type of storage and battery life.
For me that was 10" (1024x600), 160gig and about 5 hours.
Perfect for throwing in my hand luggage, storing the pictures from my camera and maybe doing a little bit of office work.
For the kind of price these "netbooks" are starting to reach I would just go and buy a laptop... Except I already have one of those.
So stop using new technology to add more and more features, just use it to make them more "netbook"... Smaller, lighter and lower power!

Could this be Intel Atom based answer to the recently released HP Pavilion DV2 which has the new Athlon Neo CPU in it?

I thought that Intel were going to use the CULV series of CPUs for that?

Cheers,

means shared memory. Not dedicaded