Take Lindows. Yeah, it's some grubby little company in San Diego trying to make a go of ultra low end PCs running a Linux distro. Yesterday, they introduced a "new" [read: three year old technology] laptop for $799, and boom, it's all over the media. But... really, so what? You could just buy a Dell laptop running Windows for $719 instead - and it's got a bigger screen, runs nearly three times as fast... and, most importantly, it can actually run Windows applications. Hell, it even comes with a copy of Word.
So what's really going on here?