it should be fine for basic office work to use a nettop.
a basic office PC might be a little less expensive. a decent office PC can be built for $250-ish from parts with an Athlon II X2, 2 GB of Ram, a low-end motherboard, a minimal HDD, and use the onboard graphics. Its good for word processing, web use, flash games, and so on.
that would not include a monitor.