I suspect you didn't own one of Apple's "leading" MacBook Airs then
There's a reason why other manufacturers didn't launch Air clones: the Air was an inadequate computer. Badly designed, with insufficient cooling, it couldn't do anything as complicated as watch a YouTube video before the CPU's thermal throttling kicked in and reduced the whole system to a crawl. This is not a manufacturing fault; I had the unit tested several times, and compared it with a friend's model too.
I know how stupidly cold they keep the offices in Infinite Loop, but it would have been nice if just one person had tried the case prototype in an environment where the ambient temperature is *above* 20°C - you know, like a typical European living room?
A stupid design overcomes any clever manufacturing. It's only now that there's genuine low-power Intel chips that you can make something like the Air and not be laughed out of the market (Apple avoid this by charging so much that their customers won't ever admit they bought a lemon; the more you charge, the less likely it is that your customers will complain)
I had a MacBook Air, and I had only ever bought Apple laptops, but my current laptop is a Sony Vaio. It's nowhere near as sleek as the Mac, but it actually works, which is something the Apple product never did.
I'd be tempted by one of these Ultrabooks once someone hacks MacOS to it.