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Australian Government Backs OLPC
angry tapir writes "One Laptop Per Child Australia had a win in the recent Australian budget, receiving federal government funding for the first time. OLPC Australia will benefit from $11.7 million of funding, which will be used to purchase 50,000 laptops to distribute to students. The organization recently launched a new initiative that builds an educational ecosystem around the laptops, to help integrate them into the learning process."
So you could get a cheaper computer. Then what? You need them configured, a support structure, additional software etc. All that costs money. You can't just take the experience of someone buying a computer for themselves and translate it to the needs of the government buying 50,000 units.
Like you, I did the calculations and was frankly surprised at how cheap it worked out to be.
As an IT guy for a school, CD Drives are completely unnecessary in student laptops/netbooks. While most software publishers send the software to us on CD, I rip it off the CD and package it into an app that'll run fine on the computer (usually there's no copy protection to worry about) then it's just as simple as rolling it out over the network.
The price is probably not just the hardware but also some sort of supporting infrastructure as well.