Summary: Display: Easily the clearest, most luminous and pleasing display I've ever seen on a laptop. It's not that mushy TFT stuff that makes dimples when you touch it; the surface is a hard, crystalline screen that places nothing between your eye and the image. As you can see, the quality of the image exceeds the beautiful TFT screen on my iMac desktop. I also have an outstanding Trinitron CRT for the Wintel machine, and it actually looks rather faded compared to the MacBook's display. Astonishing.
Keyboard: An ingenious piece of design. Again, I have to resort to superlatives: it's the most natural and comfortable keyboard I've touched on a laptop, and it beats most full-sized ergonomic boards. The spacing, location, and action of the keys has obviously been carefully thought out and rigorously tested. Apple design genius at its very best.
Processor speed: Intel Core Duo 2 heaven. It handles complex OS, graphical, and processing tasks with snappy aplomb. On my iMac PPC machine, just right-clicking a file to bring up a menu, or opening an application like Firefox or Word, would mean waiting through a delay of several seconds while the processor struggled with the request. On this machine, the spinning beach ball, bouncing dock icon, and winding wristwatch are very rare indeed. Some applications (see below) that have not made it into Universal Binary Land will strain the processor a bit, but this is a situation that can only improve with time and future development.
Two-finger scrolling: It's one of those "how-did-they-do-that" moments: you put one finger on the trackpad and the mouse arrow moves around as usual. You put another finger down and slide them left to right or up and down, and you're scrolling whatever window you're in, horizontally or vertically. Put down 3 or more fingers and the scrolling stops again. Very cool, and very useful.
Weight: The MacBook is barely over an inch thick and five pounds light. It's easy to carry around the house or inside a bag (I have a backpack-style bag for it, and recommend this type of sack for any portable).
For $1300, you get a mega-fast laptop with the iLife06 software suite bundled and the Mac webcam built into the screen, along with the PhotoBooth software for fun.
Now that CS3 is out, PS is now universal binary, which leaves just MS Office for Mac as the biggest animal still not in the UB Zoo yet. Reportedly, the MS Mac Unit has Office for Mac 2008 in beta testing now, and will have it released by yearend.
The video on the MacBook comes from an onboard Intel chip, which borrows RAM from the system memory to deliver graphics and video. It does it very well for ordinary applications like browsers, Quicktime files, Photoshop and iPhoto processing, and the like. But I suspect this is not a gamer's machine. For one thing, after playing a game with rapidly moving parts for a few minutes, the hard drive starts revving like a jet engine, and that's not a sound I prefer to hear coming out of a computer. That means the video chip has exhausted its supply of RAM and is hitting the swap file pretty hard. So if you're a rabid gamer, I have the following advice: (a) get a life; and (b) if (a) is not possible for you yet (I understand, I've been there), then pick up an Alienware box or, if you need a Mac, a MacBook Pro or one of their desktop machines, which have freestanding video cards with 128MB or 256MB of VRAM fueling them. Also, if you're a video professional (photographer or filmmaker), the MBP would be a better machine for you if you can afford the additional $700 or so.
But for what you get with the MacBook for a mere $1300, this machine is truly a bargain (and when's the last time you heard anyone say that about a Mac?).
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