They actually make pretty decent MS-Office machines and super portable dev boxes.
Or if you want to put together a cheapo NAS, a netbook, a couple USB hubs and a half dozen 1TB external HD's will serve as a pretty decent NAS for a fraction of the price with tons more capability.
Or as a little print server or cheapo box to test network junk on
Or a super portable slide presentation machine (with one of those pocket projectors) for doing pitches (bonus, you can also edit the slides on it!)
They're also small enough to open up all the way in coach on a plane, with space left over for a mouse and your drink so you can get some work done on a long flight (whether that be writing documentation, putting together presentations, hacking some code, or whatever else you want).
On vacations I use mine to offload photos from my camera, then I can go and sort and edit them while watching TV that night, and it's small enough to fit in every tiny hotel safe I've ever come across. Being able to do this has saved more than one traveling companion from disaster...folks who had left their laptops behind in lieu of a portable HD for offloading their pictures.
They're fast enough to play some old games (I like to play Sim City 4k on mine), but it plays lots of casual games like plants vs. zombies ok.
or watch some ripped movies, pretty much any ripped DVD will play fine on it (I also have an external drive I can hook up, but I usually leave that at home). I have usually a dozen or so movies on mine at any one time. I rarely turn the hotel TV on when I travel.
I also have about 10GB of old 78s ripped to mp3 on it for background music when I can't get on the web (http://78records.cdbpdx.com/).
It's fast enough to run emulators for anything It's small enough I literally can't tell if it's in my backpack or not, and it's so small it takes up the same space as a book.
Oh, and I have a few thousand e-books on mine (and comics CBZ, CBRs).
And I have some music production software on it, it's good for most things so long as I don't rely on too many real-time effects or push the multi-channel stuff too hard. But I've cranked out a couple decent tunes on it.
It can, in a pinch, act as an emergency swap out for a main computer. My wife's computer died in an electrical storm, and for a couple weeks, she just hooked my netbook up to her monitor and ran it at 1680x1050 to get some MS-Office work done. She plugged a USB keyboard and mouse into the available slots and still had another left over for her thumb drive she drags back and forth to work. That basically saved her job over one particularly grueling project. It wasn't super speedy, but she got her work done.
I'd imagine taking it to school would be perfect because it's so small it fits on a regular student desk with space left over for a mouse.
You could probably travel with one of these https://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/usb-gadgets/c609/ and get some multi-monitor goodness from it while on the road.
Overall, I'd say it's probably the best $300 I've ever spent on a piece of consumer hardware. I do a ton of traveling and my netbook has literally been around the world with me half a dozen times. I've entirely stopped taking my regular laptop with me as I found I simply didn't use it and it felt super bulky in comparison (plus I couldn't figure out what to do with it when I was out of the hotel room since I couldn't fit it into a safe).