I have to say that my Sony S1XP laptop is one of the best products I have bought in years. Its totally transformed the way I have worked on my home stuff, with a wireless connection to the web I can sit in bed and write this blog entry, or lie on a sofa whilst coding democracy.
The screen is amazing, and the graphics card more than adequate (ati 9700).
The only downside (and its a noticeable one) is the battery life. 3 hours if you are lucky...
I think with laptop components, more effort now needs to go into power consumption.
Take video cards and hard drives. I really don't need more than 10 gig on here, but it has 30. I don't really need a DVD writer, but it has one, I don't need top-notch performance in any area on a mobile PC.
Yet when it comes to specs, most laptops put video card specs and drive sizes way ahead of battery life. I'd gladly swap my 30 gig drive for a 10 gig one that ran on less power, Id happily lose DVD writing capability if it stretched another 30 mins battery life.. This is a good place for someone like Clive Sinclair to come in with some really cool invention that gave us mobile users back some battery time. Maybe they could recover the kinetic energy of keystrokes or something... (can u tell I'm not a scientist?)