The Airbook's biggest fault is obviously its lack of an optical (DVD or CD) drive. Sure, you can get the external wireless optical drive, you can get the external wireless hard drive (devices I am yet to have the privilege of testing) - however, your average Mac user simply wants a configuration and application base to work with - not a bunch of complicated add-ons.

Red corner - Microsoft Office 2008.

Although the OS X Leopard (v.10.5) installation CDs come with software that makes it very easy to share a Windows PC's optical drive with a Mac over a network, the problem is that Office 2008 was released prior to this particular brainstorm. Therefore,  due to some form of antiquated and proprietary disc encoding technology, PCs can't read and can't share the discs that are required to install Office on an Airbook, because Microsoft have encoded them in such a manner as that they can't normally be read by PCs.

So you need another Mac. You might try third-party apps like Macdisk, but who has time for that? Let me know if it works, but otherwise, just find another Mac.

If you have a wireless network (presumably a LAN or VPN would suffice) with another Mac that is above 10.4.x, then simply by enabling sharing for the CD/DVD drive in System Preferences (under Sharing) you can easily access that drive over the network from your Airbook, and very slowly install the applications that you need (first enable disc sharing on the second Mac, then you should be able to find the disc in Finder on the Airbook as a "Remote Disc").

So be warned. Despite its incredibly appealing allure, the MacBook Air does come with a bit of a support overhead.

Next up I'll explain how to deal with Microsoft's usual reverse-compatabilty issues now that everything seems to be a .docx file when you just want a .doc file and noone in the office can help you out.