With your mx51 netbook you've traded power consumption, noise and heat production against performance. If you value the former more than the latter, there is no discussion.
Ah. Okay. I'm reading/responding on my phone and I thought the i was an L.
The intel chip is definitely interesting.
Indeed it depends on what your needs/wants are. There are still quite a few people out who do expect an ARM device to have the same performance as an x86 one.
There are actually 2 different ARM cores that can be licensed, one is power efficient, and one is for performance. As far as I know, "everyone" licenses the power efficient one. I'd be interested in the performance one, but I'm not sure who licenses it. I could see Calxeda licensing it since they are in the server space, but I don't believe they are.
With your mx51 netbook you've traded power consumption, noise and heat production against performance. If you value the former more than the latter, there is no discussion.