seacue,
For the price it is a good deal. Personally I would not mind USB 2.0, Firewire, WiFi, Floppy Drive, 512Mb of RAM, etc. but I do not think they are critical in a "toss in your flightbag" computer to take on trips with you. You might want to add a WiFi card to the computer so you could access the net on a wireless network. With USB 1.1 you can get by in a pinch, but you can always use the 100baseT NIC or the CD-RW to remove large amounts of data from the computer that you would not want to run over the slower USB Port.
The pluses for it is the 15" screen and the mobile 2500+, (which makes it one of the fastest of the sub $1,000.00 notebooks on the market).
If you wanted a notebook that is a desktop replacement, then the
eMachines Notebook w/Athlon 64 3000+ is the way to go. That notebook packs everything you could ever want in a notebook and with performance to spare for the future.
Take Care,
Richard