Too bad nobody's making ultra-cheap machines yet.
Why aren't there 50$ SOC systems on the market ? Not tablets , desktops will do, or thin clients.
First post ?
As a powerpc mac owner, I can tell you the reason. For one reason or another, developers (including a lot of oss folks) insist coding X86 only software along with SSE stuff.
So lets say you dare to buy an ARM based netbook, you will find a lot of -already not enough- existing software has either no binary packages or impossible to compile for ARM. Add idiots like Nokia who acquired Qt and removed PowerPC 10.5.8 (most stable OS on planet, no enhancements posted) from official support or Adobe who also removed support from such a stable OS (even in flash plugin updates), you see the picture.
Sad thing is, one can't even blame Apple -yet-. They said "Please use OS X APIS, please don't do hacks" to people who wants future/backwards compatibility. People who listened to them still just clicks to some pref in XCode (or add couple flags to gcc) and ship everything to 10.5.8 and 10.6.x even without having a 10.5.8 machine.
PS: Please don't even mention "everything can be compiled, gcc is so great" etc. type stuff. Just point me to a Mozilla Firefox 4.x officially supported ppc binary (you can compile as tenfourfox on 10.4.11) or Opera, the ARM guys and their PPC compatible 11.x release.