Apple may be cruising for a bruising in the laptop market, with or without a new super-duper much-rumored tablet-like thing it refuses to confirm, and which it will be loath to call a netbook. But it may not matter, since Apple isn’t always about market share.

Small, relatively inexpensive, lightweight laptops geared to Web-based computing are gaining in popularity; even vendors like Intel and Qualcomm — not known as device manufacturers — are jumping into the market (Qualcomm is calling its device a “smartbook”). Of course, traditional hardware device makers like Dell and HP are also introducing netooks.

With good reason:

In a survey of 300 students headed back to school, Retrevo, an electronics product review search service, found 34 percent said they intend to buy a “small lightweight netbook,” while 17 percent stated they will opt for an Apple MacBook. Most respondents intend to buy a full-sized, full-powered PC laptop, with 49 percent aligning with a more traditional Windows configuration.

The netbooks are a significant threat to Microsoft because many of them will run on smaller, more agile operating systems than Windows — like Google’s Chrome, Intel’s Moblin, and vanilla Linux among others.

So far, Apple is the only major vendor to have announced no plans for a netbook — going so far as to say it doesn’t “do” cramped keyboards and inelegant devices on the cheap.

So far, the main attraction of netbooks is their price, and Apple is unlikely to compete on that score; indeed, it fairly owns the high end of each of its markets, and its tremendous profit margins more than compensate for its unimpressive market share in the PC market.

Apple is in no rush to introduce whatever it is it will introduce in its own sweet time because time is in fact on its side. The main selling point for netbooks today is price, but Apple’s sweet spot is with high-end users who still need time to get used to the idea of cloud-based computing.

Once those customers are weaned off of Windows-type software loaded onto their local machines, and become accustomed to running software and storing data in the cloud, they will gravitate to the most attractive product offering that configuration — and that, once again, figures to be Apple.

And of course Apple is already paving the way for this by building its own cloud-computing data center.

[Image source: Photo by roland via Flickr]