The first gen Air was probably the most unusable machine Apple has created since the NeXT acquisition. It also didn't sell well, so it hardly 'created a market'. Only when second gen came out, with much better harddisk, more ports and better chipset, they really took off. The first gen was a good investment into the future by Apple, a testbed to try out new manufacturing technologies and probing the market. I suspect this Macbook could turn out the same, even though it's probably much more usable than the first Air.
The original Air basically created the "ultrabook" market and ended the netbook one. I doubt anyone at Apple is disappointed in it.