Nice article, especialy useful in times when mini-notebooks, or netbooks come to be more and more popular. I am owner of HP 2510p almost 6 months and I love this notebook. It was extremly cheap for me - just 450USD from ebay. Small, well featured, ultra-light /1.6kg/ and 6-7h on 6-cell battery. Btw I think that overlaping battery is quite useful - just try it - as IT admin I use it every day - one can hold this notebook easily in one hand while doing many common service work, and type with other hand. I got my HP with Windows XP Pro, so its much faster than with Vista. I installed tripple boot on it, XP Pro, Ubuntu and Mac OSX 10.5.4 - just used external USB WiFi for Mac OSX, all other HW is working in all OSs.
I never understand while to bother with popular trends like Asus Eee - no DVD, limited HDD options, extremly LOW battery time /I expected much better performances with Atom and SSDs/, small size-display like from Gullivers fairy-tale. Thers only one good point - price. And its fun that if you want all these features on new EEE-like notebooks, you have to pay 500-700USD. So why not to pay more and have all fetures together like in HP 2510p or Toshiba R500. Or try ebay like me, and its even cheaper than new EEEs with Atom.
But maybe I am wrong and EEE targets different audience.