I have an Acer Aspire One with Jaunty on it. When I want an external monitor, I plug in a monitor; when I want an external keyboard, I plug in a keyboard; and so on. The only benefit I can see to a docking station would be that you only have to plug in one thing instead of, like, three things.

Incidentally, the only problem I have had setting up and running Ubuntu on the netbook was that the default wifi driver is a bit flaky. I switched to madwifi-hal and did a bit of set-up as per:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireOne#line-207

Now it works fine.