I got my mum a decent laptop from ebay for 300EUR, and installed Linux on it. At first I also thought she would only email and surf the web, but recently she asked for Google Earth and got herself a digital camera. On average, my parents do more weird stuff with the computer than I do (for example my mum keeps scanning things to email them to friends).

Maybe the OLPC would be better than the eec? I think the eec's display looks ugly, what's up with the big borders?