Making the waves today is a roundup of MacBook Air reviews by all the big names: Steve Pogue at the New York Times, Edward Baig at USA Today, Steven Levy at Newsweek, and Walt Mossberg at The Wall Street Journal. Initial assessments have been mixed, with comments of awe in terms of the MacBook Air’s design, and disappointment with its features. Overall, though, people seem to be optimistically giving Apple the benefit of the doubt. (No one wants to be “That Guy” who bashed the Air only to have it sell like hotcakes. Or like iPhones.)

Basically, the MacBook Air has a number of pros and cons:

Pros: thinner than Karen Carpenter, 13.3″ screen, practically weightless (or: 3 lbs), five and a bit hours of battery life, powerful (up to 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, which is a lot for an ultraportable), integrated webcam, and cool (figuratively and literally)

Cons: low resolution LCD (1280 x 1024 is almost too low these days), up to 80 GB hard drive, irreplaceable battery (unless you hand $130 over to Apple and let them do it), no optical drive, one USB port, no ethernet port, no cellular broadband, no wireless USB

Just looking at the features, it is easy to see that thinness is the MacBook Air’s platform. The processor and screen size get a nice boost compared to other ultraportables, but what really sets it apart is its width. Everything else is, feature-wise, a negative for the Air. Based on this, the Air is irrelevant at worst, or a secondary machine at best.

However, judging by feature matrices sucks. As Charles Miller says,

A feature matrix says: “Here is what everyone else is doing. To be competitive you must do the same.” Where’s the differentiation? Where’s the innovation in doing exactly what everyone else does, ticking the boxes, shaving off one or two points in each row so you get the green tick?

More specifically, feature matrices suck because they are so general. As far as the matrices is concerned, each feature is as important as the next. This is inane, as some features are clearly more crucial than others, and this breakdown clearly differs from person to person. Irregardless of any weighted listings, that most feature matrices neglect to even mention the operating system points to something being obviously broken. (OS X is such a unique beast that choosing between it and Windows is a necessity before shopping for a computer.)

Unfortunately, with a $1,799 base price, it is difficult to look past the features. At that price — the same as 15″ MacBook Pro — I want a competitive primary machine, not an elegant secondary machine. Honestly, the Air strikes me as an overpriced internet appliance, not a full-fledged MacBook. And perhaps that’s on purpose. With Steve Job noting the Air’s complementing other appliances like Time Capsule and Apple TV, it may well have been designed to be one piece of a set.

So what bothers me is not the MacBook Air’s features, which are perfect for a good number of people (students, heavy travelers, gadget mavens). My problem is that the Air is stunted, needing a number of (often costly) external additions if you really want to customize it to suit your needs. Moreover, these add-ons negate its selling point: svelte thinness and portability.

I am in love with the MacBook Air in theory, but am not swayed by its initial implementation. By the time the first refresh is released, Apple should be able to fit at least a 160 GB hard drive in there, bump up the battery life and screen resolution, integrate cellular broadband and wireless USB, and maybe even drop the price a little. At the same time, houses and campuses and cities should all have ubiquitous WiFi, Netflix and the iTunes Movie Store will have significant share of movie rentals, and CD/DVD-installed software will be a thing of the past.

Then I’ll really be in love.

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