Well, I went out and bought the UX31E Zenbook--I chose the RSL8, which was on sale at Office Depot.
I'm not sure of the difference between this RSL8 and the others, I'm only seeing it at stores that have a brick and mortar location.
http://www.officedepot.com/a/product...Computer-With/
The processor might be a little slower than some of the DH ones, but it's still quite nice. Very light weight. Like the Macbook Air, which I think it's supposed to challenge, there's no onboard ethernet, but they do supply a usb dongle with ethernet connection--Apple charges $30 USD for theirs. It also includes a nice little case and a connector for an external VGA monitor.
Very few negatives. There are only 2 USB ports, on opposite sides, which means that one can't always use those low end ($20-$40 USD) USB drives that have two USB connections. In my (limited) experience, sometimes, such external optical disk drives will work if you only plug in one USB connect, but other times, they need both plugged in, and the distance between the two connections is short--so in many cases of these drives, it wouldn't stretch across to plug one connector in each side. The one on the right is USB 3 which is nice, though in my case, where I don't often use external USB storage drives, probably won't make a difference.
Wireless works out of the box--I had a minor problem, as I did a minimal network install, and it didn't install wpa_supplicant. So, while I was able to install over the network, upon first boot, I had no network connection.
The ethernet connection (that is, the USB dongle to ethernet) needed a driver. So, I downloaded the wpa_supplicant rpm and its one dependency, libnl, onto another computer, put it on a USB stick then installed it. Then I was able to install the other tools I needed to build the driver. Supposedly, the driver will soon be built into the kernel.
Sound and webcam worked without problems. I don't use suspend and hibernate, so not sure about that. Same with bluetooth, I don't use it. Though the battery is reputed to last for 6 plus hours, even when fully charged, Fedora was only showing it as having about 3 hours life. I haven't investigated that very thoroughly yet.
There are apparently two possible mouse pads that you can get with it, an Elantech, which should work (with some tweaking) with typical things such as scrolling and the like, and the Sentelic which doesn't seem to work well. I couldn't, for example, get synaptics to load.
Note that I do a minimal install with openbox as my window manager, so it's quite possible that those who use Gnome or another full fledged desktop environment might have different results.
For those with an interest in it, though FreeBSD will install, I haven't yet seen anything indicating that anyone has done so--I couldn't get either network interface working with it, but didn't try that hard--a bit of googling, a few feeble attempts to load some drivers, and that was it. Linux, however, seem to work quite well with the machine and for a few hundred dollars less than the Macbook Air (with comparable specs), it's pretty easy to get Linux working on it.
A good Ubuntu write up on it
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AsusZenbook
And one from the Arch Wiki
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Asus_Ux31