I personally would either go with a 180/180c, or a Duo 270c. The 180s are large, fast, and have all ports integrated (along with an onboard FPU) with a fantastic grayscale (180) or colour TFT (180c) display, where the Duo would need a Dock of some sort for the ports (and a full Dock for the FPU), though it also comes with a very nice colour TFT.

I'd really rather have the Duo, mostly because it's tiny, and the full-size Duo Dock II has: NuBus expansion slots (for networking and better video), an FPU AND a small L2 cache, and can be fitted with an internal hard disk for extra storage. Just don't go with a 280 - sure it's an '040, but it's an LC040, and is incapable of using the FPU and L2 caches of a Dock, thus it's forever coprocessorless. Its performance isn't all that great when compared with the other '040 'Books, either.

You can also get a PPC-based Duo 2300 and substitute its trackpad for the trackball of an older model.

The only real negative to the Duos is, of course, the keyboard. Once the keyboards are back in full operation, though, they tend to remain usable if they're used regularly.

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Actually the 280c compares rather well with the 540c speed-wise. The 270c is a much slower animal, and by this I mean in terms of user experience rather than the artificial benchmarks (yes, the 280c is faster there too, for what benchmarks are worth), but admittedly the 270c is a rather elegant machine. I especially like the power-saving features of the 68030, and the math co-processor (the Duodock II's math coprocessor will therefore not work with the 270c either, as the machine already has one). In terms of speed, the 270/270c is very comparable to the 180/180c, and the 280c to a 540c, at least in broad terms. I have actually read in some Mac literature of the early 90s that the 280c was faster than the 540c, but I have found them round about the same.

As for the 2300c, like all its 603 cousins, it is a dog in daily use by comparison with the 280c in particular, and I have one with 48MB of RAM, 7.6.1 and Speed Doubler installed on which to base the comparison. It has a slightly larger screen, of course, and one which uses different technology, but its great advantage is that it has a very usable keyboard. (The older keyboards do "soften up" and improve with a day or so of use, by the way.)

In terms of power usage and battery life, the 270c wins hands down. Next comes the 280c, and finally the 2300c. I know this from trying the same battery in each model. You get nearly an hour more out of my one good Duo battery in a 270c than you do in a 2300c, and 30 mins or so more in the 270c than in a 280c.