Netbooks were pretty cool as far as form factor went, but indeed, they were mostly utterly useless, often running clocked down single-core Atom chips...
I used to see a lot of them in conferences where college students or industry folks had them for note taking and had a bigger, bulkier, more powerful computer elsewhere. As a primary computer they were lacking, but as a second one they were cheap and easily mobile.
The tiny keyboard combined with my oversized hands made it really hard for me to justify as a note taking tool haha. But yeah, I definitely can see them being used for this purpose. Especially since the laptops of that era weren't particularly lightweight either.
