Thglimited - Heavy Industries

Asus has been one of the IT-industry's most avid second-rank brands for a decade or so, but emerged a few years ago as a trendsetter in manufacturing, engineering and design, most prominently manifested in the introduction of the leather-clad S6 notebook series and the presentation of numerous IT design studies sporting casings made of bamboo.

While it took more than a year after the release of the S6 for a competitor - namely BenQ's R45 - to enter the arena,...

... the market will be quite crowded with products sporting wood veneer by the time that Asus will start shipping the bamboo-versions of its S6 and U6 notebooks in June.

MSI is having its take at the product category around that same timeframe and Fujitsu is showing off its Wood Shell concept notebook.

Manufactured in Taiwan, it seems Dell's bamboo-clad small form factor desktop computer will also come in a more common plastic flavor.

Last but not least, Korean manufacturer Cowon has introduced its N3 media player which comes with a walnut veneer.

With all these "new applications of old materials", promising products that will age beautifully in a similar way as a pair of jeans does, I am asking two questions:

In terms of design, to me leather products always speak of portable items (think "wallet" or "filofax") while the use of wood mostly suggests stationary objects, e.g. furniture.
For this reason, I am wondering whether all the veneered gadgets above will be accepted by customers in the same way as the leather-clad S6 notebook (not really a retail success due to its high price) was. What do you think?

Secondly, Asus's original bamboo notebook was touted "Eco-Book" and deserved this name through the use of easily removable "wooden skins" that would be used as decoration to an inner structure made of plain, easy to recycle plastic.
While this could be considered an eco-friendly alternative to the layers of spray-paint applied to common IT products, the devices above feature veneers that are permanently attached to the products' plastic/metal structures. The resulting composite materials are - from an environmental standpoint - probably a worst case scenario and I wonder, if the market will be able to see this through the marketing stunt of "natural materials"...?