I own an Emachines laptop myself and I love it. I was wary of buying one because I had heard the horror stories about them when I used to work at Best Buy. The funny thing is I was comparing the components (harddrive, CDRW drive, builtin wireless card, etc.) in the Emachines laptop I bought and another Compaq laptop when I was looking at buying one and most of them were not only the same manufacturer but they were the exact same model. That and the fact that I had heard that they aren't having nearly as many problems with their products anymore made me buy my laptop.
As far as that $200 computer, I was actually thinking of buying it just to gut it for parts. Decided against it though cause I am completely broke right now.