It's also a typical piece of Toshiba plastic garbage, weights almost 7 pounds, is over 1.5" thick, has about a third of the battery life, at best.
Seriously, is this some revelation to you? If you do not care about a lot of these things, you can get some great low prices on machines with very high specs.
Care about what? Getting the MOST for my money? Am I really supposed to spend $1300 more on a weaker system just so it can weigh a little less, be a little thinner, and get battery life I'll never use in the real world?
Weight and thickness are a non-issue considering the system is being carried in a backpack.
Check out the HP Envy 15 if you want to see what happens when you make a thin 15" machine with a quad core i7 - you end up with a machine with pretty abysmal battery life and an enormous heat problem.
Or I can look at Apple's line of Intel systems if I want to see what happens when you combine a thin case with poor cooling. I've already had two MacBooks replaced thanks to Apple's design and lack of proper cooling systems.
The Toshiba I linked to is half an inch thicker than the MBP. Big deal. For something I carry in a backpack, this would be a NON ISSUE.
We could play this game all day, frankly. It's always been possible to pick out specs and say "But look at this laptop - it has the same or better specs, and costs half as much". But people do ignore build quality, screen quality, battery life, etc. when making these comparisons. There are almost always tradeoffs with laptops.
Build quality? Apple's computer build quality is definitely given more credit than it deserves. I've already had two systems replaced due to poor build quality (heat causing case cracking and discoloration) as well as their repair centers botching the repairs multiple times and being without my system for weeks at a time as a result. Even the system they replaced it with, the aluminum MacBook, had to go in for repair because of either a firmware update killing the optical drive or internal heat due to poor cooling and ventilation. When it came back to me I still had to make a 70 mile round trip to the Apple store to the bottom case replaced that was scratched up during the repair process.
Screen quality? Again, Apple's screens are given far more credit than they deserve. The only screen on any Apple product that deserves praise is the iPad screen. But even that suffers from a seriously low refresh rate.
Battery life is the only area Apple wins. And thats only because its cheap. Apple would rather spend very little money increasing battery life than take smaller profit margins to sell reasonably spec'ed machines.
In my experience, PC batteries charge significantly faster than Apple. I have the aluminum MacBook with a "5 hour" battery and it takes twice as long to charge as the 12 cell battery (7 hour) in my HP.
I'm not saying that the MBP is perfect, or that there aren't some really nice PC alternatives (but I would point to Asus and Sony as companies that make nice alternatives, not crap like Toshiba or the flawed HP Envy). But it's important to look at the whole picture.
Funny you point to Sony as quality and call Toshiba crap, when Apple, Sony, and Toshiba all use the same Chinese manufacturer. The only difference between them is that Apple uses metal that can dent, bend, warp, and scratch.
I own a lot of blu-ray movies (sorry but there is no legal way to get a movie in anywhere near blu-ray quality + HD Audio) and I have no way to watch them or even rip them onto my macbook pro. Will Apple ever offer blu-ray!?