A friend of mine was looking for something to take to Spain when she visits relatives , it had to be a certain size as her idea was to take only hand luggage.
We thought about a tablet thing, but the lack of a decent keyboard, a laptop was out of the question because of size.
We decided to look at netbooks, including a Chrome one. She found a netbook at CEX for £180 a Samsung NF110, not that old either.
I have never been a fan of netbooks, because they seem so under powered, but to be honest this Samsung is pretty good, a Intel Atom (yuk), 1GB of memory, a 320GB hard drive and running windows 7 starter. I had to reinstall it, because CEX put all their own branding on windows and trying to remove it was a pain. then putting some security and other bits on and taking bits off took a bit longer.
But I put it through a fair bit and the battery lasted over 7 hours and that was using wireless. and bluetooth.
the keyboard is really nice to use even if it is not full size, better than the keyboard on my own laptop and the sound from the internal speakers are pretty good as well, the microphone works well for Skype.
All in all a good machine, that will do the job of allowing the owner to write poems while she is in Spain, use Skype when she is home, less hassle than using her desktop and do other stuff.
A tablet as well as costing a lot more, certainly a Ipad, could not do all of that unless you pay for extras.