Cool, to each their own,
but sounds like a lot of excuses to get the latest toy from apple

(my dad does that whenever he's trying to defend the "awesomeness" of ios).
I mean seriously, you were happy with the MBP for so long, obviously there were many reasons for you to like it, but come new apple macbook air and it's like "Hmm suddenly i hate this and this and this about the macbook pro, and the solution to my heartaches will be the macbook air".
Again to each their own, that's just how I'm seeing it and I'm not trying to be offensive.
This was not a knee jerk action and I'm not really hating anything, but the two hour battery life on my current MBP was getting to be a real problem. I spend a lot more time running from meeting to meeting and having to run back to my desk to get the power adapter was getting to be a pain.
In addition, this is my company system and I've had it for 3 years now. The thing is old and I'm scheduled for a company paid upgrade. So one way or another I'm going to get a new toy.

The only question is what to get?
I was originally looking at getting another 15" MBP, and that would certainly solve my battery problem. But there was the MacBook Air introduction, and I got to thinking...
I have an external Blu-ray burner, and really don't need an internal SuperDrive. Also, I really don't need more more CPU or graphics performance for what I am doing either. I do a lot of HD video stuff at home, and have all that data on giant 3.5" external drives. So, a big internal HDD wasn't really going to help me either. And then there were my friends who upgraded to SSD have been raving about the speed improvements...
I started by pricing MBP 15" with SSD's but that put me over $2300 -- and that is with the bottom of the line MBP 15". Sure, one of these units would probably speed up by video encoding, but any of these systems with SSD was going to be over my budget.
It then became a choice between the MBP 13" and the MBA 13". I concluded that I wasn't going to get much of a performance gain by going with the 13" MBP. Additionally. going to the MBP 13" would mean a significant reduction in screen resolution from what I have already.
To be honest I would go probably with the MBP 13" if it had the same screen as the MBA 13 -- or I would have gone with the 15" if it were about $300 cheaper -- especially if I wouldn't have to deal with the sharp edges on both of the MBPs.
As things are right now the 13" MBA is the best match for my needs.