Why does my netbook have more USB controllers than ports?

Solution 1:

It's common these days for devices to use USB for internal device interconnects; think of it as using USB instead of PCI as its system bus.

Solution 2:

Some of those might be for internal devices. Without knowing specifically what's in your netbook, it's conjecture, but you may find if you disable them things will quit working (like say, webcams or card slots). Even if you do disable them, you're unlikely to see a substantial increase in performance on anything on the other ports unless you're already maxing out the throughput on the bus which is fairly unlikely with anything other than a full-blown hard drive.

EDIT: That "your devices can perform faster" message generally means either A: Exactly what it says (but I doubt any new devices have 1.0 or 1.1 ports) or B: It's a powered device that isn't getting enough power, like say a hard drive that you don't have the AC adapter plugged into. EDIT: Or see @AndrejaKo's suggestion of updating chipset drivers (although they SHOULD have worked out of the box.)