This sums up my experience, too. My only real use for it ended up being for weekend/day trips where I didn't need to work and wanted to be quasi-offline but might want to connect to a third-party wifi system (like a motel's) for some light internet browsing.
Anybody still doing anything useful or interesting with theirs?
One of my friends brings either an OLPC or an Alphasmart to Burning Man every year.
In one of my other comments in this thread, I mentioned that I used my olpc to animate this logo [0] and to make a patch adding a dodecahedron to the X.org utility ico [1].
Anybody still doing anything useful or interesting with theirs?