The MacBook Air has landed — with mixed reviews.

While some signal the thinnest ultra-portable laptop the market has ever seen a boon for business travelers, others are doing benchmark examining that reveal the MacBook Air is slower than its sister laptops.

MacBook Air measures 0.16 inches at its thinnest point, while its maximum thickness of 0.76 inches is less than the thinnest point on competing notebooks. MacBook Air boasts a 13.3-inch LED-backlit widescreen display, a full-size and backlit keyboard, a built-in iSight video camera for video conferencing, and a trackpad with multi-touch gesture support so users can pinch, rotate and swipe.

“Performance is obviously critical to all users; however, the emphasis or the main feature of the MacBook Air is portability,” said Richard Shim, an analyst at IDC. “As a user, you have to understand that you are going to sacrifice undoubtful key capabilities, but you are gaining thinness.”

The Most Common Criticisms

MacBook Air

is powered by a 1.6-GHz or a 1.8-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 4MB L2 cache, and includes as standard features 2GB of memory, an 80GB 1.8-inch hard drive, and 802.11n Wi-Fi technology and Bluetooth 2.1. An optional 64GB solid-state drive contains no moving parts for added durability.

MacBook Air users can buy the companion MacBook Air SuperDrive, a compact external drive, for $99. The SuperDrive is powered by MacBook Air’s USB port, eliminating the need to carry a separate potential adapter. MacBook Air delivers up to five hours of battery life. And Apple’s Migration Assistant software lets users transfer files, applications and preferences from an old Mac to MacBook Air by a wireless network.

Two of the most common criticisms of ultra-portable notebooks are the sacrifice of performance and features. Apple’s MacBook Air wins praise for overcomes some of the obstacles of previous ultra-portable machines.

“Apple set a new…

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