I bought this from the Dell outlet store as a "scratch and dent" item.
The product appears to be brand new with no defects that I can find.
I immediately removed and installed Fedora10x64 and have not had any issues.

1) The video card (Intel) works perfectly including Compiz.
2) The LAN worked right away during install.
3) The WIFI card is a rebadged Broadcom (BCM4312) which didn't work immediatley, though after installing the Proprietary Broadcom package via YUM, works perfectly (including showing available WIFI hotspots using the GNOME GUI.)
4) The inbuilt webcam worked right away with "Cheese" and Skype.
5) All audio worked right away using Pulse - including microphone. Although, I thought this had an external mic. and if it does, that doesn't work. I have had to use a headset. Not a big deal for me and I will investigate further whether there is an external mic or not.
6) Screen resolution 1366x768 which is the advertised maximum was detected and setup automatically during setup.
7) Power management and battery reporting worked right away.
mouse touchpad works as expected.
8) DVD-RW and SD card slot reader works perfectly.
9) From turn off to logged in and GNOME desktop ready to use is 65 seconds (maybe 5 of those seconds is me logging in.)

For me this laptop is for utility use - e.g carry around places, Internet surfing, study, running VM's (which works fine using Sun VirtualBox) and so on. I haven't tried, but suspect this wouldn't be the best unit for any high powered games because it is under powered, but as cheap unit that "just works", it hasn't disappointed in the 2 weeks I have used it.

A common test for me is "would I buy it for my wife (who is non-technical) and install Linux?" ... and would definitely say yes at this stage.