Back in day, i was running Visual Studio 2008 on a Atom N270. Later, i ran a laptop with Atom N550 for quite some time with reasonable success.
Only thing, that's really too much for it, is today's browser engines. They are not really suited for those CPUs. Though, there are other browsers running reasonably well on those machines.
The only true lacking of those Atom based PCs, that i miss, is the limitation of 2GB of ram. If the chipset would allow, i would stick 4-8GB of ram into them, and they would be flying bullets!
(I still keep my EEE PC 901 and EEE PC 1015PEM around. I wouldn't get any money for them, yet they are perfectly running machines for some future experiments.)
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." - And i intend to get every last bit out of it even after loading every damn driver!