<p>Another vote for the Thinkpad. And the fact that the guy who invented the TrackPoint (the keyboard centered pointing device) is now teaching at MIT in the Media Lab has nothing to do with my preference. :)</p>
<p>macbook pro. leopard (OS X 10.5) will be better than vista and if you really want to you can dual boot with vista/xp and os x. i would wait a little longer though until the core 2 duo processors come out (i think that is what theyre called) with the merom core etc.</p>