A friend of mine did just that. She bought a new netbook instead of an iPad. She simply wanted it to browse the web, read e-mails and a few other simple tasks while out.
She got an urgent call to download an e-mail and reply to it. Fired up the netbook that hadn't been on for a week or so. Fucking thing went into its Norton Virus Scan and you simply could NOT get ot of it. Said it was going to be an hour. Took the battery out to kill it. Put it back in and rebooted and back to the same fucking thing.
She says it takes over all the time. Also says it is a PITA to connect to wifi.
After fifteen minutes of screwing around... I passed her my iPhone and she touched the Safari icon, typed in the website for gmail, entered her gmail account info, signed in, read the e0mail, replied and was done in two minutes. And she had NEVER touched an iPhone before.
We went out and bought an iPad 2 and an apple bluetooth keypad for home, right then. That was a month ago and she is ecstatic.
She says it JUST WORKS!
And that Mr. Woodpecker is why people love Apple.