Asus x205ta vs. Macbook Air 11

My little daughter is 9, and we've decided it's time to get her a laptop.
I was looking for something that has a small form factor, no moving parts, and inexpensive.
Was considering a Chromebook, but then came across the x205ta from Asus - A small, Chromebook-like device, capable of running Windows 10.

Price was under 200$, so not much of a risk, and after receiving the machine with windows 8.1, I had to upgrade to windows 10 (Left the upgrade working overnight.)

After using it a little bit, the obvious question was - How does it work in comparison with my (Now wife's) Macbook Air 11?

So here are some conclusions:

- Specs: The Asus has budget processor, 32 GB drive, 2 GB ram and costs 25%. Though these specs are quite nothing in comparison with the Air's Haswell processor and 4/128 RAM, But you can get a 128GB micro SD and extend your HD capacity for dirt cheap.
- Form factor: The tiny Asus is a bit lighter, smaller width, and thicker than the Air 11.
- Finish: No comparison here. The Asus feels much cheaper. Its keyboard and touchpad are ok. The screen has the same resolution, but isn't as good. But it's completely ok, considering it costs quarter than the Mac.
- Performance: Well, you can't really compare a budget processor and 2 GB RAM to a top of the line one with 4 GB. But Windows 10 actually works really well, runs office and browsing fine, and (Compared to the unusable Metro UI) is very comfortable to use. It's not a gaming platform.
- Battery life: Now this is the first time I've seen a windows laptop runs so long between charges. More than 12 hours (For browsing and office usage). The Air? 9 hours was my record.
- Software: The most important software for my kid is office, and though Office runs on both laptops, Hebrew support for Office still lags on Mac OS. The Asus comes with 1 year free Office subscription.

In conclusion - This is a very smart buy for students. Cheap, light, fun to use, and runs everything you need - It's not a tool for heavy programming, photoshopping or gaming, but rather for browsing and office applications. The price is the main disruption here - Why get a tablet for your kid when you can get her a fully functional laptop?
This is quite like comparing apples and peaches (Pun intended) - Eventually, if I'm a casual user, this is a no brainer - The Asus takes it. But if I'm a heavy user and need an ultraportable, the x205ta isn't an alternative to the Air. I would look for something more in the area of the Air's 800-900$ MSRP (Yes, they MSRP for less now...).

The untapped computing power

Now that cloud computing has taken over the web, it's time to think what would be the next step. Considering that the cloud providers are making money out of renting CPUs and storage. But there's already a lot of CPU power and storage connected to the web, and not being used most of the day.

This thought kind of takes me back to a '97 project called seti@home. That project used home PCs to parallel process radio signals from space. And though users didn't gain much from this project except for a thank you mail, times have changed since.

My wife, who has a day job, has a PC connected to the internet, operating all of the day. Imagine you can rent your computer for processing power or storage. Such network infrastructure already exists, and it would be pretty simple to install a client which receives jobs or lends storage for a cloud based network. As most search/ image processing/ big data analysis engines use map reduce and distributed storage nodes, such a network could provide a reliable, viable alternative to current cloud providers.

Been doing a lot of thinking about this lately. Who wants to join me and implement such a network?