I've got to say that I'm exremely pleased with this laptop. The only reason I gave it 9 rather than 10 is that the broadcom wireless adaptor doesn't have a native driver although it works flawlessly under ndiswrapper.

So far I havn't found any reasons to dislike the laptop other than the size f the power transformer. I also made sure I bought a model with an nVidia card so that I knew graphics would be no problem, even with svideo out.

The kernel even supports the niftly little features too, such as illuminating the wireless light when the card is active, you can even use the mail alert LED with "echo 1 > /proc/acpi/asus/mled" - I just need to find a way to run that from mozilla/tunderbird.

Regarding the thunderbird mail light, this extension might help:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/4540

It works for me on my Asus.