@Carly It appears that prices on the Asus 1005 range from $225–299 new.
That said, I only spent $500 on my Toshiba T135 that is three times as powerful, not much heavier though a bit bigger due to it’s 13” screen and larger keyboard and has better battery life than my Aspire One (6½ hours even with the wifi on) so a thin-and-light full-on laptop isn’t an unreasonable alternative. Bear in mind that that price was for something a little more loaded than you would be likely to want as well; the top trim in that model.
There are 11.6” laptop models that are more capable and not much more expensive than a netbook, and if you saw how slow an HP Mini 1000 or Eee 900-series is, even your cat will notice the speed difference. While My Aspire One was acceptably quick on basic tasks, most other Atom N270-based netbooks I’ve tried had load times in the “make a sandwich” range for programs like Firefox or OpenOffice.