The last two months I've been following developments on the Moblin project with great interest.
Moblin 2.0 (in Beta at the moment) has the so called 'Clutter interface' as it's base. This interface makes it easy for users to get optimal Internet and multimedia use out of their netbook.
Originally this project was started by Intel and this year they have opened it up and placed it in the hands of the Linux foundation (http://moblin.org/).
Amongst others, bootspeed, optimal use of screenresolution and power consumption are cleverly optimized for use with Intel Atom netbooks. Now this project has become an open one I can see optimizations coming for other platforms as well.
A glimpse of whats coming:
Having a touchscreen now really makes this a rich OS to have running on your netbook! Up to now I wasn't really interested in getting a netbook, but this certainly makes me wanna get me one of them! :)~
openSUSE is also participating in this project and has published some iso's containing a full beta install : http://news.opensuse.org/2009/05/19/moblin-v20-beta-on-opensuse/
IMPORTANT when testing this beta: at this moment the installer does not have an advanced partitioner: your hard drive on the install target will be reformatted!