Dell’s first ultrabook, the XPS 13, is now available. And it’s attracting a lot of attention as one of Dell’s best laptop designs to date.

The XPS 13 boasts solid specs for the base $999 configuration, is priced well below the MacBook Air, uses a smaller footprint than 13-inch competitors, and taps carbon fiber materials in the chassis to keep the weight below three pounds.

Starting at $999.99, it comes — at that price — with a 13.3-inch/300-nit/1,366×768 display squeezed into a 12-inch chassis (roughly), an Intel Core i5-2467M processor, Intel HD Graphics 3000, a 128GB solid-state drive, 4GB of memory, backlit keyboard, and Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit. It is 0.71 inches at its thickest point.

Other standard features include a 47WHr 6-cell battery (built into the laptop and not replaceable by the customer) rated at a maximum of over eight hours, one USB 3.0 port, one USB 2.0, mini Display-Port, 1.3-megapixel Webcam, and dual-array digital microphones.

How does that stack up against Apple’s MacBook Air on a pure spec-to-spec basis? Well, the Air is priced at $1,299 for a similar configuration.

A higher-end XPS 13 configuration ($1,499.99) includes a 1.7GHz Core i7-2637M processor and a 256GB solid-state drive.

All configurations include a 4G hot spot, according to Dell’s site.

This isn’t Dell’s first flashy super-svelte laptop for consumers. In March 2009, it introduced the 13-inch Adamo that was one of the few laptops from a first-tier PC vendor that competed directly with Apple’s MacBook Air.

And, as a reference point, the Adamo came with a power-efficient Intel Core 2 Duo chip (which eventually hit a top clock speed of 2.1GHz), a 1,366×768 display, Intel 4500 graphics, 128GB SSD, 2GB of memory, and started at $1,999.99.