@Mark,
As you go for the netbook, be sure you understand the speed restrictions of their SSD disks - especially to do with disk writes.
The Acer one performs pretty well on linspire though. Should work as well on ubuntu - it will depend on how write intensive the file system is.
If you ever choose to go Windows way (you showed no intent of ever doing that - but just in case) go with FAT32. NTFS performs poorly on SSDs. I hear Windows 7 will handle it better.
Again, be ready to perform a flash disk install as the netbooks I know dont have cd drives. U can attach an external one however. But then again, there are many many docs on installing linux from usb disk.
Er... that's it