So if budget is your ultimate issue, you may be willing to accept a few tradeoffs -- shorter battery life, fewer pixels, missing software you may not have used anyway -- to save a thousand dollars.
Once you start down that path of reasoning, it's worth going all the way: Maybe you can get by on a $300 and free Web-based applications like Gmail, Google Docs and Photoshop Express. That might, in this economy, be the coolest solution of all.