I received my laptop earlier today and have spent most of the afternoon and evening playing with it.
If you do get this laptop and want to use wireless, make sure you go into the Windows Control Panel, double-click on the Broadcom Wireless Utility icon, then click the check box that says "Let this tool manage your wireless settings." I spent a couple of hours fighting to get the laptop to connect to a WEP-encrypted network and it just wouldn't do it until I told the system to use the Broadcom utility instead of the Windows "Wireless Zero" utility. It's been working perfectly on wireless ever since.
Anyway, here's my impressions of the laptop after about 8 hours of play time:
First off, the battery life on the laptop is nothing special, but it's nowhere near as bad as what tkidd said. I charged the battery up to full and then unplugged it and kept it running full power until the battery was drained completely. I didn't play any movies since I didn't have any on me at the time but using wireless the entire time and playing online java/flash games and web surfing I got 94 minutes of run-time out of the battery. As I said, it's nothing special, but certainly enough for short trips and times when you just don't want to plug in. If you need a lot more battery life, the 8-cell battery might be worth considering.
The laptop does get warm on the bottom. It's not at all hot, but after running it for almost four hours straight (I shut it down for a while to bring it home from the in-laws') the center of the laptop on the bottom is warm enough that it might be uncomfortable to some people so for extended use you might want to put it on a desk.
The screen is very sharp, bright and clear. Mine has no dead pixels at all. There is some very slight light bleed in the upper left corner but it's only noticeable on a very dark screen (might be an issue when playing dark movies). I found it odd but amusing that the Windows Display Properties actually let me set the screen resolution to 2048x1536. It did so using overlay (only see 1280x800 pixels at a time and scroll to other parts of the screen) but I thought I'd mention it if that sort of thing appeals to you.
There is a very small amount of flex in the screen if you push in opposite directions on the upper corners of the screen but I had to put a decent amount of pressure on the screen to get any movement at all and I wasn't about to push hard enough to see what it would take to actually flex the screen.
The keyboard is very quiet and comfortable to use. Some of the special function keys are in different places than on a desktop keyboard but the letters and numbers are spaced exactly the same as on a desktop keyboard, making it very easy to type quickly. If you have long fingernails you might have a bit of trouble with the keyboard, though. The keys themselves are so shallow that it's possible to slide your fingernails under adjacent keys while typing so you'll want to be careful with this. This is a pretty common thing with laptop keyboards and I have short nails so it doesn't affect me, but again I thought I'd mention it.
Although I knew this before I purchased the laptop, I am a little bit disappointed that it doesn't have TV-out or Firewire connections. There is actually a spot on the front of the laptop where a Firewire port should go, but it is sealed over, and the only "video out" connection is the standard VGA connection so as was mentioned previously, if you want to connect to a TV, this isn't the laptop for you. I don't connect to a TV so that doesn't matter to me, but I do have a firewire video camera and it would be nice to have the option available to connect it to the laptop while traveling.
Most likely one of the first things you'll want to do when you get the laptop is to go into the system BIOS and change the video RAM setting from 128MB to 32MB. 32MB is the lowest setting available or I'd probably go even lower since any memory assigned to the video card is taken away from the 512MB of total system memory, and since you're not going to be playing games on this laptop, there's no sense in wasting RAM that could be helping to run your applications faster.
The CD burner seems to work fairly well. The few discs I tested took about 6 minutes from start to completion for a full 700MB disc.
The touchpad is much nicer than I expected. It is "widescreen" in size to match the size of the laptop monitor and, unlike most touchpads I have used, it doesn't send a "click" to Windows if you breathe on it wrong. I wasn't able to find a way to completely turn off the tap-to-click function in the touchpad's driver utility, but it actually takes a pretty solid tap to get a "click" to register in Windows so that's not nearly as much of a concern as it is with most other laptops I have used.
Also, despite what I said in an earlier post about the laptop having mono speaker and headphone jacks (I said this based on information from a couple of different sites that were selling the laptop and listed mono sound in the specs), my laptop does have stereo speakers and a stereo headphone jack. The sound from the speakers is passable as far as laptop speakers go, but if you're watching a movie or listening to music and care at all about sound quality, headphones are definitely the way to go.
The one thing that annoys me about this laptop more than anything else is that it comes from Acer with the 40GB hard drive split into two partitions formatted with FAT32. This isn't a huge concern as far as actual use of the laptop goes, but with such a relatively small drive there's no reason at all to be splitting it in half, and NTFS is definitely preferable when running Windows XP...
edit: Fixed a couple of typos.