Yes, The MacBook Air Is Practical.

11" MacBook Air

 I finally did it.  After lusting after the original MacBook Air (MBA) for years, I went ahead and purchased a (refurbished) Air. I bought the 11' model with the 1.4Ghz processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 64GB SSD drive.

Since buying the Air, or even just talking about buying it, the people I've talked to about uniformly agree on two things: the first being that they all think the Air is super sexy and most would like one.  The second think they ask me is why I "need" the Air.  The want to know how it will suit me better than the 13' MacBook Pro and iPad 2 I had at the time.

Friends would tell me all the reasons why the Air was such a terrible decision and that I should just stick with my Pro.  "Think of everything that you will lose going to an Air! Smaller screen, no DVD drive, less storage, less ports, less, less, less...  But what people don't understand is that almost all of these "killer features" of the non-Air laptops are typically never used.

1.4gHz 4GB RAM 64GB SSD

I've been using the MBA for almost a month now, not once have I regretted the decision. I've used it to surf the web, made a video with iMovie, used iTunes, and even used Photoshop. Not once did I feel "compromised", I didn't need a bigger screen, nor a DVD drive, or even 4+ USB ports to get any of that done. I'm not pressed for storage either; the limited 64GB SSD has about 30GB free currently and since it's my laptop (and second computer) I don't need to store all my media on it.

2011 MacBook Air vs 2008 MacBook

Most people could easily get away with the Air being their only computer; of all the computers I get in to work on most people's media collection (music, picture, documents) is less that 5GB. Now that's just for your 'average' consumer, I know there are people out there with enormous media collections; my personal media collection is over 30GB. But even then the 128GB SSD would be more than enough to hold a large media collection. 

2011 MacBook Air vs 2011 iPad 2

The Air is fast, light-weight, with a great battery life. I can't recommend enough to someone, either as there only computer or as a great companion computer. Unless you really "need" a DVD drive (the Air can install software from any computer DVD drive on the same network PC or Mac) or lots of processing power the Air is hands done the best computer I've ever owned.