I tried out a new MacBook Pro the other day, and I instead bought a Lenovo ThinkPad W700. The W700 has a 17" 1920x1200 non-reflective super-bright (400 NIT) display w/built-in color calibrator activated in the laptop base when you close the lid. It has a Waacom graphics tablet in the palmrest. You can buy it with a Blu-ray burner (Dell doesn't offer one). It has the same killer NVidia Quadro FX 3700M GPU w/1GB of video RAM as the Dell (twice as fast as the discrete GPU in the new MBPs). Plus, at least with my configuration, it was cheaper than the Dell, so I got a lot more for my money. I bought mine with a 4-yr, on-site, next-business-day warranty, which includes accidental damage protection (covers spills and drops). If something goes wrong with the laptop, a service technician comes out the next business day, to my home or office, and fixes it. AppleCare only provides a 3-yr warranty, w/no accidental damage protection. Check the Lenovo coupons section of notebookreview.com for any coupon deals, plus they have a detailed review on their site written by a photographer. Also check out the gov't & edu pricing on Lenovo's site if you qualify for that (for higher education, you have to have a .edu email address, and your institution has to be in the list on their site; they also have deals on their site for secondary education, but I don't know the details). For the educational pricing, look closely for the coupon code Lenovo lists on the right side of their educational page once you specify your institution -- that code will save you significant money.
I have a couple of graduate degrees in digital image analysis, and the problem I had with the new MBP is that I couldn't see any shadow detail in images, due to reflections in the glass screen. No matter how I repositioned the display, all I could see were reflections in those areas. Very frustrating. I also didn't care too much for the new glass trackpad, which seemed to be buggy (sometimes wouldn't detect my finger motions) and I've seen reports from others on this as well. Also, the vent design of the new MBPs is fairly screwy, and there have been some reports of overheating by gamers. Lenovo, on the other hand, has copper heatsinks and a great cooling system. Plus the ThinkPads have spill-resistant keyboards: liquids come out through drain-holes designed into the bottom of the base. Apple, on the other hand, has no spill-resistance, and instead has moisture detector stickers in the MBP that, when activiated, change from white to red and void your warranty.
Plus the 4GB memory limitation on the new Mac laptops is a deal-killer, compared to 8GB on the new Intel Centrino 2 laptops. ifixit.com has tried to put 8GB in the new MBP, and it doesn't work. And, as someone else here said, Photoshop CS4 is a 64-bit application under Vista 64, but only a 32-bit app under OS X.
It was a no-brainer for me, particularly after Apple failed to refresh the 17" MBP.
