To be honest, a super slim laptop like that will always come out wrecked if it hits a stone floor. That's not really Apple's problem. If anything, the fact the internals are ok is testament to good construction.
Not my Sony G11 for starters. And that was 200 grams lighter than the Air.
No, this is simply a testament to Apple's obsession with a material not all that suitable to build laptop / chassis' out of for reasons of looks, unifying their manufacturing methods and other reasons which can only work because the vast majority of the rather vacuous users of the company's products don't go 'It's easily damaged, it's crap' but 'It's easily damaged, I'll baby it / spend even more money on third-party accessories trying in vain to protect it'. This works because said third-party accessories serves to... well, accessorise, and that is what the average Apple user loves, or the product is babied because it's much more frequently a less commoditised personal purchase.
To have good structural integrity in the Air there must be more material than there is, which would make it heavier. The same goes for the new MB/MBPs which have adopted the same chassis arrangement. As for impact resistance - forget it. The actual main 'chassis' on the Air - which is the case, the top shell that the keyboard mounts to - is not exactly lightweight when you compare it to chassis' on other better engineered ultralight machines. 'Aircraft-grade' aluminium, even when the block is cold-rolled to the level of relative hardness of the plates that the Macbook Air / MB / MBP chassis are machined from, is still pretty soft - and more importantly, has nothing in the way of being able to 'bounce back' from an impact like say polycarbonate. But sure, I'll give you that it
looks better than polycarbonate, moulded mag or thermoplastic short-fibre carbon.
Apple's inferiority in materials / structural & other engineering is not new in the Return of the Jobs era. Take iPods - how long did it take Apple to make a scratch-resistant screen? I had a < 3-year-old Nano until recently which frankly looked like crap, and the material hasn't changed for the Classic - only now they've changed to glass for other machines. In contrast I have a 5-year-old Sony player used in much the same circumstances whose clear plastic panels still look reasonably untouched and a > 2 year old Sony flash player which is three-quarters clear panel and has been treated very badly but still looks a hell of a lot better than the Nano.
Apple of now are excellent designers - that's where they get you. But in reality, they can't engineer worth a **** although they do a superb job of hyping up whatever inadequate but different method they've used, and their products - and their most enthusiastic users - are testament to this.
