She might not be as pretty as her Mac counter part, but at least its functional. I really don't think the world is quite ready for an optical drive-less PC.

Oh, I could live without it for day to day life - I just like that the X300 doesn't force me to live without it and all of the rest of the features are VERY nice. I mean if it's like the reast of the X line, you can swap out the drive and pop a plastic filler in it's place. But I had a Sony 505VE that didn't have a CD drive for it - it was a PCMCIA based external drive. Used it - literally - one time to install the OS.

It's all good though. The sad thing is that I'll probably never own an X300: SSD isn't worth cost and they don't seem to be offering a cheaper if more fragile HDD model.