“What I’m about to show you,” Jeff Bezos says, “is the culmination of the many things we’ve been doing for 15 years.”

The CEO of Amazon.com, in regulation blue oxford shirt and jeans, is sitting in a conference room at his company’s spiffy new headquarters just north of downtown Seattle. It is mid-September, exactly one week before he will introduce a new line of Kindles to the world. He has already shown me two of them—one with a touchscreen, the other costing just $79—but that’...

Nothing gets the gadget fiend excited as much as the phrase, “A Best Buy Exclusive.”

Expectations could not have been lower for this machine, seeing as it’s headed into that electronic dumping ground: Holiday season at big box retailers.

Sure enough, Toshiba’s Portege Z835 looks at first blush like just another knock-off of the MacBook Air, stripped down, all plastic, and price-slashed to bring it down to a super-cheap $900, exactly in line with the new Acer Aspire S3. And yet the Portege offers some very compelling...