Well... the cheapest notebook from Dell is actually much closer to $400. It has exactly 512MB of RAM. And it does not run Windows, it runs Ubuntu. They better care about that.

Yeah, they have the mini notebooks that are pretty underpowered for that price. However, the regular 15" notebooks are about $500 and ship with 2GB of RAM. Its also worth noting none of the mini notebooks even ship with Vista (Ubuntu or XP are your options).

As long as Windows 7 runs well on 2GB most people won't care. One of the reasons vista reception was so poor was that 1GB RAM simply didn't cut it, but that's what every low end PC shipped with.