The MacBook Air reminds me a lot of the original iMac - revolutionary in what it keeps and what it leaves off, a little underpowered, and lacking a nice fast connection (the first iMacs had USB 1 and no FireWire).
The main issue appears to be how much you can keep on it (I do hoard files a bit but the main space fillers on my drive are my iPhoto photos), and if you're not keeping a lot on it - the speed you can access the stuff you have "offline".
I'm still not sure if you can actually boot off the USB 2 bus but the wifi is certainly not a great option for high speed, large data transfers. Booting from USB (or something like the FireWire Target Disk Mode) would certainly make me (a professional Mac troubleshooter - goodness that sounds pretentious!) happier.
The much talked about arrival of the Sun ZFS file system would in theory make a great advance for users of Desktop machines - run out of space, just add a FireWire drive and forget about the rest (no repointing iTunes libraries or shuffling files around). Laptops however are something different. Maybe we need something easy to say what we need on the run or not. Unplug and go - and leave your iTunes library on your attached drive/s knowing that that leaves plenty of space on your MacBook Air (and that your music is probably on your iPod/iPhone).
I like the Air (hard not to when you see it and hold it) but I'm not sure if I can currently dow without the FireWire and (less so) the optical drive.
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