In the last six months, I’ve spoken to a variety of laptop vendors about netbooks, and the sheer range of opinions and strategies is fascinating.

This week, for example, I was talking to Thomas Teckentrup, the general manager of Toshiba Europe Computer Systems, and his take on netbooks was decidedly downbeat: “We have to find out the usage of these products”, he said, explaining his company’s late arrival into the market and the fact it hasn’t exactly exploded onto the scene – the Satellite NB100 is only available with one specification, and there are no options. “We [still] have to see for ourselves how consumers are going to leverage the features of a netbook,” he later added.

And to be fair, this is a view very much shared by Dell. When I interviewed Michael Dell himself in late September, he was virtually dismissive. “Certainly we have already entered a product there [the netbooks sector], and there will be additional products coming, and it will be what it will be. [But] I don’t think it’s going be the massive factor in the growth of the industry.”

Contrast that with Acer. At this year’s Global Press Conference in Budapest, the CEO and president of Acer, Gianfranco Lanci, spoke for a good five minutes about the netbook, and made it clear the Aspire One was just the start of its aspirations.

“Internet is becoming part of our life, but people need it to be mobile,” Lanci said. “People in most cases prefer a full internet experience [when on the move] to a limited internet experience on a mobile device. On a netbook you can have a full experience.”

Then you’ve got Asus being similarly bullish. Indeed, an IDC press release that just fell into my inbox declares: “Asus stepped further up [the notebook vendor rankings] to 4th place shipping over 2 million units this quarter, leveraging from the unabated success of the Eee PC product range.”

Of the rest, HP has been decidedly half-hearted with its one netbook offering, the Mini-Note, Sony has actively dismissed netbooks as a “race to the bottom”, although indications are that it will release a netbook some time soon, while the ever-aggressive Samsung has produced one of the sexiest netbooks we’ve seen in the form of the NC10.

It’s obvious that this is a sector that’s having a huge effect on vendors’ sales figures. Here’s a not very beautiful table, courtesy again of IDC, that shows the number of PC shipments (both desktop and notebook) in 1,000s of units in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, in which it compares the third quarter of 2007 to the third quarter of 2008:

Toshiba has good reason to be cheerful as it beat the market’s growth, but both HP and Dell who either entered the netbook market late or half-heartedly, have less reason to shout. On the other hand, the two companies that really excelled – Acer and Asus – are the ones that embraced netbooks wholeheartedly. Even if you remove the boost Acer received due to its acquisition of Packard Bell and Gateway, its sales are still up 63.5%.

Sales, of course, aren’t everything. We hear reports about a high volume of Linux-based netbooks being returned because consumers who bought them on a whim then find the OS too difficult to use, and it’s impossible to know for sure just how much profit Acer and Asus are actually making from each netbook sale. Or even if they’re making a loss.

Nevertheless, it’s obvious that netbooks are here to stay, and the big vendors who’ve traditionally made their money through more expensive notebooks will have to embrace the new form factor if they’re going to make any impression on the market.

And in the end, they’ve nothing to lose. All the signs are that consumers are buying netbooks as a secondary PC in the west, so it’s an additional not a replacement purchase. They also open up the traditionally closed market of education. There’s the opportunity for shared revenue when the netbooks are sold with a 3G contract. And finally, there are promising signs for netbooks in the developing worlds too.

The end result? By this time next year, I’m 93% certain all the major vendors will have some serious netbook offerings, not just their current token efforts, and they’ll all be casting accusing looks in the boardroom as to why they allowed Acer and Asus to pull out such a big lead.