And that’s the key. Android has some missing functionality from its support of Google Apps (and one or two other things), and in order for me to consider it a viable netbook/laptop/desktop platform, those would have to be addressed. Specifically:

1) Google Reader – add/edit tags for an article, add subscriptions, change subscription settings. Also, there are some “UI shortcomings” on the Android version: lack of shortcuts, lack of “total article count” at the top of the article list.

2) Gmail – add/edit filters and labels, “filter messages like this”, “send as” one of my other registered email addresses.

3) Google Docs – last I checked, Android doesn’t support full read/write of Google Docs. I’m also not sure if it will fully display PDFs, Word, and Excel documents. What I would want is all of that, plus some ability to sync the various Android notes and tasks/to-do lists into some level of Google App (there’s a new tasks/todo feature in Gmail or Google Calendar, so that’s one option, and then just adding plain text and rich text support to Google Docs would probably handle the rest, along with a sync utility for the Android notepad and todo apps).

4) I haven’t been able to get VNC Viewer and SSH (connectbot) to work together. This would be a “novelty” on my phone, but a necessity on a netbook or tablet. Further, on a netbook, I’m going to want to export my display some how (manipulate the netbook from my desktop) — I do this on my Samsung Q1 Ultra with Ubuntu-UMPC, for example. But I mainly run the VNC server on my samsung because the software for mirroring the display out to the external VGA port is kind of broken (what it does: want to step down to 800×600 resolution; what it should do: display the 1024×600 screen with letter boxing on the 1024×768 screen).

5) The built-in IM client doesn’t allow you to use non-Google Jabber accounts, nor IRC. I would want both of those handled. And I’m not sure the UI is ideal for managing multiple conversations. Further, I would want to be able to log conversations to plain text files on an SD card or something.

6) SyncML client for Calendar data. Funambol gives you SyncML client for contacts, but that doesn’t help me with my work calendar server :-)

As an interesting note, Freescale is saying they’re going to make ARM based netbooks. So you don’t necessarily even need to further develop the x86 version of Android in order to make this a reality.

Here’s what I’d want to see, hardware wise:

A convertible/tablet netbook that can fit comfortably in my gadget bag (say, about the same size as a Everun Digital Note), 1 or 2 USB Host/OTG ports, 1GB RAM, options for 8, 16, 32, or 64GB solid state storage, an SDHC card slot or two, wifi, BT (with support for at least DUN, PAN, FTP, HID, and BIP), internal PCI Express Mini card slot (with antenna wire available for those who decide to put in a WWAN card), USB Client for mass storage mode and charging, 8 hours battery life, portrait camera with flash and video capabilities (I don’t care either way about a chat camera), DVI-I display port (or, possibly, Apple’s new display port), internal microphone and external mic jack, 3.5mm headset jack (and built in speakers, of course), accelerometers for detecting screen orientation and movement when in tablet mode, Dpad and utility buttons (home, menu, “back/undo”, dunno if you’d need the green button, but I think you need the red one for power/sleep/screen-saver) on the sides of the screen.

I’d buy one of those.