17" - External Display or Not?

Well, it's much easier to buy an external display than to return one. My advice - see if you can get used to the 17" on its own. If you can't, in a couple weeks/months just get an external display. It also depends on your needs. Me, I love having an external display (I imagine I'll love it when my new MBP 17" arrives too), so that I can work on one screen and have a full-screen iTunes thing going on on the other screen. 17 inches is a lot of screen real estate, though.

 

External Monitor = Great Investment depending on your needs

I'm a little anal when it comes to my ergonomics and stuff, so I found with my home office the 17" was a little awkard when "docked" as I need to lift the laptop onto a stand to promote airflow. Needless to say it gets super-hot underneath. It also pushes the screen back a little bit which is compounded by the higher res.

I hook my 17" 2008 MPB to an Apple 30" Cinema Display that's closer and it's awesome. I work in Flash, Photoshop, Eclipse, UML modelling tools (and am known to fire up World of Warcraft) from time to time. High resolution real estate with minimal flipping, sliding, tabbing, yada yada is very important to me.

That being said, I wouldn't consider myself suffering if I "only" had the great 1920x1200 17" (matte!) screen.