Neal... The form factor of the net books like the EE pretty much preclude the inclusion of a DVD player. You could, however, use a utility like Alcohol
http://www.alcohol-soft.com/ and solve the problem...
I'm using the non-expiring freeware version of Alcohol with my Vaio. You have to search around the website to find it... It allows me to mount up to 6 "virtual drives", each drive contains the contents (a disk image created by Alcohol) of 1 DVD which in turn has 4 Sherlock Holmes episodes. Basically I have 24 1hr movies... Each image is around 7Gb in size for a total of 49Gb of disk space used. It would be a simple matter to use Alcohol to create the disk images and mounts for full-length features. The limitation would be disk space...
I think you could create the disk images on your PC (with a copy of Alcohol installed there) and then transfer them to the net book via USB drive or similar, placing one image to one directory. You'd need a copy of Alcohol on the net book to create the mount points for the directories and bingo! movies without a DVD player.
One of the pay versions of Alcohol (Alcohol 52%, more suited to laptop use) allows up to 31 drives to be mounted. Probably far more than a net book would need tho'...