I'll admit that I haven't tried Brazos, so I can't speak to that, but the Atom based netbooks, and earlier AMD based netbooks I tried were absolute garbage.
Brazos still isn't some power house, think of it as a 1.6GHz dual core K8 with a bit better than 4200 series graphics, but with much better GPGPU drivers. For the low power use, it's pretty much spot on for what most users need IMHO. That's not to say Brazos notebooks are all that, they're still a cheap low end device.. but hey, that's just how every notebook in this price range is, you've got to find the better models amongst the crap.