cannot agree with you more, made a mistake of buying a vaio 16.4" 2 years ago, thinking as a desktop replacement, but now that is quite a pain(literally) to move around
Sorry, I don't understand.. how can a laptop be more of a pain to move around than a desktop??
Yes, a large laptop will be heavy and not that portable, but only compared to a smaller laptop. There's no way it can be compared with a desktop which permanently occupies a large desk in your home. If you calculated the permanent space occupied by a desktop v/s the rental cost of that amount of real estate, that alone justifies the additional cost of a laptop. IMHO, the space saving and portability that a laptop provides simply cannot be matched by a desktop - you can lock your laptop away when not using it, you can move it around to different rooms if needed, and there are far fewer wires to deal with.
If ergonomics is a problem, there are other solutions as well like laptop riser, and wireless keyboard and mouse.
Back to the OP's question: I would strongly recommend a Sandy Bridge CPU paired with an SSD (at least for the OS) and/or a 7200rpm HDD. Sandy Bridge CPUs also come with an inbuilt GPU which has a dramatic performance boost - should be more than sufficient for hi-def and light-weight gaming. This will give you better performance than almost any desktop.
In terms of brand, I would always recommend Thinkpad for its durability, engineering, and keyboard. However, there are plenty of other options nowadays. It might also be worthwhile looking at the corporate versions of laptops (usually targeted at businesses) as they are most often better built and come with lesser pre-loaded software junk.
Edit: You can read a review of Sandy Bridge's mobile performance
here.
To quote from the article:
"Not only do we get 50 to 100% better performance than the previous generation high-end Intel mobile chips, but we also get more than double the integrated graphics performance and battery life in most situations should be similar to Arrandale, if not better. And thats looking at the quad-core offerings!"
"In summary, then, Sandy Bridge improves laptop and notebook performance to the point where a large number of users could easily forget about desktops altogether; besides, you can always plug your notebook into a keyboard, mouse, and display if needed. About the only thing desktop still do substantially better is gaming, and thats largely due to the use of 300W GPUs."
