I do not run cli only except on my server tower. I do have an old laptop
that I run without a desktop environment though. X is started on demand as
needed and a window. Manager is installed. It is at work and most of what
I do on that is using a command line statistics program.

I would consider a similar setup with a netbook, only installing firefox
perhaps? There are also a lot of programs with curses/ncurses (which
gives terminal a sort of gui if I understand that right). I recall an
earlier discussion on this list that those programs might be popular for
ham radio interfacing? I've not really looked into it before.

Definitely true that I don't think too many of the pre-prepared desktop
OSes would install in under 1GB.

Speaking of cli only though... Have you tried any of the cli web browsers?
I haven't lately, but remember well the last time I did. It was shocking
how severely tied to the mouse I am when interacting with the web. But I
hardly even noticed that at first. What I really couldn't get over were
the lack of images. (I think there are terminal programs that overcome
both of those limitations if I remember right).