As someone who considers the current MacBook Air to be "the computer", enough to have made it my primary and only machine, the MacBook Air from four years ago was horrible: I laughed at my friends that got it, and I laughed all the harder when they didn't use it for months and then got a usable laptop. The 2010 Air is honestly barely the same device as the one from 2008.
My point: pulling statements from four years ago and attempting to claim that they were wrong because the same words said today are silly or hypocritical is a little dishonest. (The classic example of this: the original iPhone running the original iPhone OS was actually not very good. Yet, people now make fun of people who claimed that, as some newer iPhone running the latest iOS is finally amazing.)
The same was true of the original iPhone. No 3g. $600 with a contract. No third party apps. Yet people routinely quote everyone (me included) who said it sucked and wouldn't sell well, even though it did miss its sales targets even after price drops.
That's just the way pontificating works in the internet age.
To start with, the 13" model (the only one available in 2008) isn't even that (ultra)portable; it is sure thin, but in comparison to that FSC Q2010 it is a monster: it is 50% heavier with an additional inch of width and half an inch of depth.
In exchange for being more consistent in its thickness (despite having almost identical thickest points), the FSC Q2010 ends up with a plethora of ports: in addition to an ethernet port (although one that requires an adapter), you had ExpressCard, an SD card slot, an external microphone jack, and two USB ports.
Now, looking back to the Air, one of the interesting design choices they went with in 2008 was to get rid of the ethernet port entirely. This is not as much of a problem with the later Airs, and not for the reason you might think... (it isn't just that WiFi became more plentiful).
Instead, the MacBook Air 2010/2011 came with two USB ports, and the 2012 model adds a thunderbolt port: it is totally fine to use an adapter on a random extra port. Instead, the 2008 MacBook Air had a single USB port; this, combined with the mini display port, was the only extensibility on the device.
In essence, everything you could possibly attach to this device but the monitor had to go in to the one port, so if you wanted 1) cellular or wired internet and 2) an iPod/iPhone, you couldn't do it. I had a friend that was travelling and ended up sitting outside of a hotel in his car trying to steal enough WiFi just to upgrade his phone to the latest firmware.
However, it isn't just these external inconveniences that defined this device; to get an idea of just how spartan the 2008 MacBook Air was, you have to realize that they didn't even manage to get stereo speakers into it: yes, the thing had only one mono speaker. This was fixed in the 2010 versions. ;P
While the RAM configuration on the 2008 MacBook Air trounces your FSC Q2010 (a device that, despite its name, seems to have been sold in 2006?), it still couldn't go past 2GB, which even at the time (the contemporary MacBook Pro took 4GB) limited your options as a developer, or even a browser of many websites. In 2010 they upped it to 4GB maximum.
Looking at the 2006 specifications for this FSC Q2010, it is ludicrous just how much stuff they stuck in it.... I mean, you had a 2G cellular radio... the people I know who travelled with the Air had to carry around a massive USB dongle to accomplish that (as in 2008, phone tethering wasn't yet that common or convenient).
In essence, no: I'd argue that the MacBook Air, in 2008, was a horrible device that was mostly based on some kind of weird design fetish of "how thin can I make a computer housed in a metal case". It was not really attempting to be a usable system: it was at best a proof-of-concept for what, after two years of re-engineering effort, they might be able to make into an awesome machine.
The result at the time was then large (width/depth), underpowered (RAM/CPU), under-featured (mono speakers), and unextensible (a single port); this is even in comparison to computers that had come out years earlier (the 2006 FSC Q2010) that were significantly lighter (2.2lbs vs. 3.0lbs).
My point: pulling statements from four years ago and attempting to claim that they were wrong because the same words said today are silly or hypocritical is a little dishonest. (The classic example of this: the original iPhone running the original iPhone OS was actually not very good. Yet, people now make fun of people who claimed that, as some newer iPhone running the latest iOS is finally amazing.)