For what it's worth, I chose not to buy the external DVD drive (I can share my "real" computer's drive over the network). I did get the USB Ethernet dongle and I use it all the time. Indeed, a have a pocket in my travel bag full of all the damn dongles and such. Still, it's better than my original Sony 505, which had this stupid bar-shaped thing for all the peripheral connections.

The SSD is the way to go. It's fast. It's shock-resistant. I like it. 2GB of RAM is plenty for road warrior tasks, including (for me) running Adobe Lightroom. I haven't tried to do any sort of virtualization.