Although the Vole has not said what it considers jolly cheap, the biggest downside is that the OS will be crippled so that it can only run three applications at the same time.
The big idea is that the Vole will help keep the price of the hardware down, but will force users who want to use it to pay for an upgrade for more usable to software.
To be fair, it would not make much sense to run more than three applications at the same time on a netbook, but it depends how the OS will count the three applications.
If you have a virus chucker that will be one gone, a word processor, that would be another. Add email and you have your three already. Some of these could boot up automatically anyway.