While some are very excited to finally have a thin, three-pound Mac they can tote everywhere, others are far more cautious. Pundits like Leo Laporte and crew, John Gruber and thousands more cite the following MBA shortcomings: the small hard drive, the price, the omission of a built-in Ethernet port and optical drive, the irreplaceable battery and even the exclusion of a Kensington security slot. Others correctly point out that the Air requires more compromises than notebooks in the same class made by Dell, Lenovo and HP (our new client).

The success or failure of this product is important to watch because it's a harbinger of just how much appetite consumers and business people have for cloud and remote data storage. Much more than Apple hangs in the balance here. Google and Microsoft - each of which takes a different approach to web services - will be watching too.