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The new MacBook Air looks great, and just oozes cool. But Apple had to remove lots of good stuff from inside that aluminum wafer, with the outed features getting a lot less attention from Steve Jobs than the included niceties. (Strange how that works!)

The voices of the Internet required all of five seconds to start compiling the MIA list, and some of them are big'uns:

• No removable battery. Can't swap a battery for power, or easily replace an old one!
• Slower CPU. If you want an Air with the nice MacBook Pro CPU, sorry – that particular Intel is not inside.
• No replaceable RAM. What you buy is what you live with for as long as you use the machine. Let's hope the next big cat OS X upgrade doesn't have a Vista-like hunger for RAM...
• No Ethernet port. If you really need one (and how often do I use my PowerBook's Ethernet port?), there is an external USB-to-Ethernet adaptor, so a solution does exist. But:
• Only one USB port! That's a surprise. Fortunately, you've also got FireWire to rely on... Huh? What's that?
• No FireWire. Period. Very un-Mac-ish. This is not your Mac for video work.
• No optical drive. A very big item, but I'm putting it last here; that's the excision that you'd have to expect from an ultra-thin, and the one that Steve fairly addressed in full. And one for which Apple has clearly considered an innovative workaround, Remote Disc. But: what about the need to boot from a disc for recovery purposes? With no FireWire for target mode work, either? That'll need to be addressed. (And I suspect the answer is "buy the external drive".)

A pretty big list, and I certainly haven't gotten everything. (I won't bother mentioning "no modem". The more people that respond with "mo-what?", the better.)

So, what's the target market? The "road warrior", obviously – but not necessarily the one who lives solely off his/her laptop. As your sole, do-it-all computer, the Air's limitations just may be too much.

I think there's a perfect use for the Air, though, and suspect a lot of people will come to the same conclusion. If you've got a big, beefy computer already, whether desktop or laptop, the Air may be a wonderful "traveling companion" second Mac. It'd be excellent for those times when you're perfectly happy to leave the optical drive and extra ports at home, and head out for a business meeting, a Starbucks writing session, or what have you. Just you and a minimal Mac, without the extras. After all, when you really need to import video or install major software, isn't that better done back at the ranch, not on the road?

So that's the magic market, I think: the to-go companion to your heavier, plugged-in-and-wired-up Mac. And what's the magic ingredient that really makes that possible? .Mac. The recently revamped .Mac, with its "Back to My Mac" feature, turns your road Mac into an actual extension of your home Mac, with access to the same files. Back to My Mac is the key to making MacBook Air a winner for the second-Mac crowd – it'd almost be like grabbing just a keyboard and display off of your home Mac, to take outside with you.

Yet I don't know that the completed picture will be all that rosy. Steve didn't even mention .Mac and Back to My Mac while discussing Air, did he? Why is that? Is the service still too buggy? And even if Back to My Mac is functioning as it should, with all the components of the Air's WiFi-happy dream world running tip-top, the unswappable battery leaves one ugly bootprint on the scenario of on-the-go freedom.

Ah well, it's still Version 1, and we have yet to see how the MacBook Air functions for real, and how its market shapes up. It's a nice machine with some great features, and will be fun to watch once it ships.