A lot of that is strongly dependent on your configuration. I'm running Slackware on a 701 (with lots of tweaks, natch) and I get well over 3 hours of battery life when not doing much, and while I have the trackpad using dedicated scroll area, I know that's a software setting, and could change it to two-finger if I wanted. (Conversely, you could change the 901 to scroll-area in software; your OS distribution apparently just has a bad default.) It sounds like you're using the performance governor for cpufreq scaling, or maybe don't have the correct driver installed at all, which is contributing to heat as well as battery life.

I picked it up mainly for hacking hardware into (for kicks), but I find it works decently as a second laptop, and as a primary laptop last week when my big laptop was out of commission. Can't wait till I get the touch screen in, though.
It runs a bit more, but I think the HP netbook (mininote/2133) has the best keyboard around, and a higher-resolution (1280x800) display, too. If it weren't for the eminent hackability of the 701, (i.e., if I needed a netbook ), it would be my top pick.