AMD VP of Advanced Marketing, Pat Moorhead, better known as Kicking Pat, claims current netbooks are overpriced and have low battery endurance, making them suitable for home use only.

In a chat with Slashgear, Moorhead said AMD is “taking a wait and see attitude" on the netbook craze. Apart from battery life, Pat also blasted netbook pricing, saying that you can get a regular 15.4-inch notebook with a dual-core CPU and Vista for roughly the same amount of green bills. While this is true of top notch netbooks, you can get some cheaper netbooks with tiny SSD drives for less, although the usefulness of such contraptions is dubious, at best.

Moorhead claims to have tried out one "of the hottest netbooks" on the market and squeezed out just an hour and 45 minutes of battery life out of it. We're guessing he had a 3-cell battery in that particular machine, it's worth noting that 6-cell batteries are available, too, but getting an after market unit will push the uncomfortably high price of a good netbook even higher.

AMD still has nothing to counter Intel's Atom in netbooks, so some of you might argue that it should put up or shut up. However, AMD isn't just sleeping, it has already prepared a couple of interesting low power CPUs for nettop machines. We wrote about the new Athlons earlier today, here. These products, along with AMD's excellent 7xx series chipsets will give the Atom in both the single and dual-core flavor a run for its money, but only in nettops.

Intel still reigns supreme in the netbook market, for now. However, if AMD seizes the opportunity and manages to ready a similar netbook platform soon, Intel will have to do much better. An underpowered Atom coupled with an obsolete 945 series chipset simply won't stand a fighting chance against a K8 based CPU on a 740/780G chipset.

You can check out Pat's interview here.