I have seen some decent IBM laptops. I don't deny that some upper level machines are quite nice.
I don't tend to use laptops as my real workspace. I normally use laptops as test machines, which accounts for my point of view. If I use a browser to download a large file, an ISO disk image for example, I notice that it takes about 10 minutes, literally, to copy the image in the tmp directory to the final destination. I put that down to having one platter and one head which has to scurry back and forth to do the copying. I am aware that extra memory would not help that situation particularly. I just used it as an example really poor performance of laptop drives. I try to avoid doing anything that requires any real performance on laptops. They are either target machines or a portable terminal to a machine that I can use to do serious work. They're not bad for catching up on e-mail during boring meetings.
Again, that's just me. Varying mileage, salt, etc.
Hugh