If it helps, I just ordered the smaller 11" MBA for my admin assistant...she has pretty minimal computing needs (email, writing, editing presentations and some web surfing) so the netbook version of the Air should be fine for her.
Order was placed this past Monday at 4P Central US time. I just got notification that the netbook has shipped and will be here on Monday by 10:30A local time (Chicago).
So that's 5 business days assuming everything stays on track. This was a CTO...I bumped the memory up to 4gigs and took the faster processor as well.