@vincent himpe

"and you may still have to buy a bunch of software and install XP on it since schools require word and excel documents"

Open office 3 works great on the mac and should do anything school kids need, as well as being able to generate docs in MS office formats. Teaching kids about variety in computing is no bad thing, rather than them just relying on all the menu options being in the same place they are at school. What would happen if MS were to completely change the UI for office for example (obviously they'd never do that, would they).

I really don't think I'd get my kids a macbook though - a cheap windows (or linux) machine would seem much more appropriate, since they'll only want a new one next year (once they've dropped this one a couple of times)...