I have a full installation of Ubuntu running on my glorified browser notebook and it can be used as a normal laptop. It performance can be a little slow when working with very large data sets but on the other hand it was just about $300 including tax so it was an enormously good deal.
No Linux distributive is mentioned in that article. I have no doubt that a combination of RAM, SSD and CPU can achieve great things with right software.
I love it.