Interesting you say this, since pretty much everyone agrees that this laptop is nothing more than a "facebook" machine. Has a slow processor, low amount of ram, awful keyboard, etc.
It has the same amount of RAM as most ultrabooks (the base model it has more than the base Air models or Dell XPS ones, actually).
The keyboard is shallow, but I haven't seen it described as "awful" or even "bad" anywhere.
Besides the fact that it's probably good enough for things that are not compiling complex applications/gaming/encoding/simulations (heavy loads sustained in time), it is more than enough for the uses that the parent wrote about (remote ssh/compiling small programs).
Ironically (incidentally) Facebook seems to be one of the worst offenders. If I sign into facebook and then forget to sleep my desktop, I can get back from a weekend away to find firefox has eaten 15gb of ram and a painful amount of swap. Chromium seemed to be just as bad last I tried it.
Maybe the problem isn't that Facebook takes 15GB of RAM, it's that Firefox or Chrome will take literally as much RAM as it can get. I should try surfing Facebook on the 128GB servers we have at work and report back my findings...