After slogging through a full installation of the Hardy beta on the ugly little laptop, I reversed direction and installed only the sparser side of Ubuntu. The goal, of course, is to collect some benchmarks for future performance guides.
Start times to a pure Openbox system are around 1:40 with an autologin script, with shutdown in 14 seconds from the terminal prompt. Those are acceptable, but this machine is capable of much better performance.
So far, Hardy without Gnome seems to be performing about the same for me as its predecessors, with the odd exception that it seems to take up quite a bit more space. A pure command-line installation seems to need about 700Mb, which is quite a bit more than Gutsy, which was on the drive with under 300Mb required.
Of course, for most people, the difference between 700Mb and 300Mb is irrelevant, since the drive is 100 times bigger than that. It just strikes me as odd that the amount reported by df -lha is so much greater than past systems.
This is all still beta of course, so it’s possible that there’s a dependency hooked in there somewhere, that is holding down one or two packages that oughtn’t be included. I’ll be patient and say there’s still time to lose weight before the big day. 
(Edit: I just remembered I have ubuntu-restricted-extras installed, so that might be the extra weight. 
)
Indeed, some of the people putting in a command-line install might be on limited disk space…
I hope they get it slimmed down a bit by the final release.