One doesn't have to go that far back. I bought an ASUS Eee 900A. It had an 8GB SSD... and Xandros, set up to use UnionFS so you could go back to the original state easily. I took it home, powered it up, and it promptly downloaded enough new versions of packages that the SSD was filled and it hung.

I wiped Xandros, installed what was called Eee Ubuntu (now Easy Peasy) and never looked back (though I since got a bigger SSD, maxed it out on RAM, and happily run Bodhi Linux)--but I can only imagine the wrath of someone who bought one and didn't know that was an option, especially one bought as a gift. I had to wonder whether it was set up to fail.