In answer to your initial question, yes! The 1400 is a great early PPC portable which is suitable for many retro tasks, and has the benefit of being able to run System 7, 8 and 9. Many will agree that the keyboard on the 1400 is probably the best to type on of any notebook Apple has produced. The 1400 models are also now available very cheaply on the 2nd hand market, though I would recommend looking for one that has a good amount of RAM as upgrades are hard to find (in the UK certainly).

The downside is no built-in ethernet, which can limit communications. There are expansion cards, as already mentioned, or you could use a PCMCIA ethernet card. The 1400 can also be kitted up with Wifi using a Lucent chipset wireless card like the Orinoco series - there are several websites that describe how to go about this.

There were two varients of the 1400 - the 1400c which has an active matrix screen and the 1400cs that has a passive matrix. Although the passive matrix is much better than those on earlier PowerBooks, it doesn't beat the crisp, bright active matrix screen of the "c" model. The active matrix model was more expensive and is generally not as common on the market as the passive matrix model.

Just to add for the sake of interest, Farallon also made an ethernet expansion card for the 1400, it's model is PN591-TP. I've got one.