I _love_ my new ThinkPad T42. I got it (care of my benevolent employer) loaded with 2GB of RAM, a 60MB 7200RPM internal drive _and_ an 80MB 5400 RPM second drive for the "UltraBay." I'm running all VPC images off the second drive, and this is really amping up my presentation capabilities. For the talk I gave at today's Microsoft ISV Community Days event, I had two separate VPCs running (one with Whidbey Beta 1/Yukon Beta 2 and the other with the Whidbey December CTP) as well as PowerPoint on the host/physical machine, and I was Alt-Tabbing between everything with ease. Oh, and the VPCs ran pretty quickly too.
This is my first IBM laptop, and I'm never going back (unless Lenovo really screws up the superior engineering of these things, which I doubt). I previously used Dell Latitudes (have owned 3 of them in total), and before that a couple of WinBook models (that was ages ago). The Dells were never great, but the last one was a horror show...I had it serviced more times than I can remember, replacing the hard drive, the DVD/CD-RW combo drive, the keyboard, and the motherboard (three separate times). The ThinkPad is just leaugues better; the 1400 x 1050 display is lovely and high-res without being illegible, and the UltraBay is especially impressive. I do think the Dell docking station was easier to use (especially because it was truly front loading), and the icons for the myriad IBM software utilities are ugly as sin. IBM's continuing refusal to put a Windows key on the ThinkPad keyboards is beyond absurd. I have mapped the Right Alt key to be the Windows key, but that's far from elegant.