Stuart,
Your SSD solution sounds smart.
In my case I have an iMac for studio, and the Air will be for the road.
I thought I could avoid a laptop on the road, but on every photo trip I missed it, and my old MacBook Pro is heavy, slow, maxed at 3Gig, battery that lasts 5 minutes, etc. I have given it a new battery, new hard drive, more Ram, but time marches on, and the Air will do the trick, now that it is fast and not as expensive as when it first came out. If you want just one computer and you need a laptop for portability, the Mac Book Pro with quad and SSD is very nice, or a powerful PC is probably smarter for an S2 user than just an Air.
Transferring LR files from the Air to my iMac using USB2 will be an overnight effort at the end of a photo trip. Too bad my iMac is last year’s and has no thunderbolt connection. Yes I could buy the new thunderbolt display that gives me firewire800 transfer rates, but I will wait for an external hard drive that takes both firewire 800 and thunderbolt or eventually a thunderbolt adaptor to firewire800. This Air will also replace my iPad with never worked for viewing Raw and was not a file backup for the field. Plus I hate typing on the iPad. The SSD speed will make up for the limit of 4Gig RAM I hope. David, I have a 13″ with i7 on order, thanks for your advice. The i7 costs an extra 6% for a minimum 10% improvement, and any of the machines are being reported as twice as fast as those of just 8 months ago. I’ll let you know what I think when it arrives.
Jack
Jack