What it adds is ease of upgradablity. 2 screws and you have access to the ram and hard drive, unlike the Wind or Aspire One which require full disassembly. Plus is has a 10" screen (Aspire One is 8.9) and express card 34 slot, which only the HP 2133 has (though the 2133 is express card 54).
With the coupon that was used I got it for $360 making it one of the best deals.

It could be shorting out on the aluminum chassis. Most laptops with metal chassis are painted, and that paint offers at least some insulation, where as the HP is unpainted. They put some pads etc in the chassis to prevent contact, but if not placed just right it could short out. Could also be tin whiskers, wasn't there some government mandate to switch over to lead-free soldier sometime soon?

Woot! Got mine ordered! The order went through with the 15% discount and I got a confirmation e-mail. $390 with tax shipped to my door!

No wait, I found the speakers at the very front of the laptop. So why is there speaker grills by the screen....

Also speaking of speakers, I don't actually see any in the S9. They should be next to the screen, but I don't see anything there. And I didn't see them in by the wrist rest, or anywhere else, unless I am missing them. Does anyone see any speakers?

Ok some important things to note. The SSD is soldiered onto the motherboard beneath the RAM. That has to be the SSD, as there was no pictures of a hard drive or caddy in the documents, so it is the SSD model. This will disappoint users looking to upgrade the SSD, though you could plugin a SATA SSD and use that. Also you could use the built in SSD for OS and a regular hard drive for storage.
Also due to its location under the RAM, you might only be able to use single-sided memory modules. It's hard to tell how close the so-dimm is to the SSD chips, but I guess that a double-sided so-dimm would be too thick to use. Otherwise a good design. The lenovo is 2nd on my list of netbooks, behind the 2133 (once the CPU is upgraded in the 2133). If it takes HP too long to ship a upgraded 2133, I will buy the lenovo S10. But I prefer the aluminum chassis, 1280x768 resolution, and powerful speakers of the HP more and am willing to pay for it. I would like a 10" screen with 1280x768 though, 8.9" seems a little too small.

Actually 8W TDP with CPU+Northbridge+MCH combined sounds pretty good.
While diamondville may only be 2W TDP, Intel's design documents on the 945 chipset with graphics and MCH shows it uses 22W TDP.
That would make the AMD solution more desirable for netbooks than diamondville+945, depending on what the graphics capability of the AMD chipset is.
However when compared to silverthorne+sch (~5W TDP) for MIDs, the AMD solution doesn't look that impressive, but still not horrible either.

3-pass wipes still shouldn't guarantee a complete wipe. Most flash controllers have wear-level algorithims that are designed to keep one section of the flash from getting written to more than other sections. This is to increase the life span on the flash, but this also prevents you from guaranteeing that evey bit gets wiped because the controller doesn't write the data bit by bit one after the other, it jumps around the flash based on what section of the flash has less wear on it. You would have to fill up every single bit on the memory, but I believe that flash as extra memory to compensate for bad-blocks, so even then you may not get everything.

I don't see why they couldn't use e-ink displays, aside from causing it to be black and white only. Keyboards are already black and white anyway.
That would probably make it extremely cheap (comparitively speaking).

If memory serves, if Power Management was set to Max Battery, then the CPU would not run at full speed even under load. It would run at the speed-step limited speed. Since it was a review model, my guess is that is was set for max battery for testing, and they probably would not have known to change it back to Balanced.