a 15" Dell laptop with a 5 hour battery life, and it uses all older, less power efficient technology (as it's 3 years old). So, 6 hours or somewhat higher isn't that impressive to me for a new, power-efficient netbook.

6+ hours is not much. Some of the compact mobile computing I am programming for runs up to 24 hours.

As for the massive screen...sure that's not a requirement.

But the last time I looked, every OS from Microsoft for as long as I remember has been more and more memory demanding out of the box. I would say gobs of RAM is never a bad thing.

Plus, you don't have to buy a smaller laptop with gobs of ram.