Yea it's a decent compact size light weight laptop. It will have the numpad and DVD rewriter drive missing, but they are not a necessity for everyone. A friend of mine got the X501A because he need the numpad for work (but not the DVD rewriter drive).
However for the peace of mind and improving user experience, I would recommend replacing the HDD with a SSD, and install a Windows 7 instead (quite a numbers of productive software are not compatible with Windows 8).