Lenovo's new Y550P is the first laptop from the manufacturer to feature Intel's beastly new Quad Core i7 processor with Intel® Turbo Boost Technology that automatically speeds up the processor when the PC needs extra juice.  The laptop also boasts a sleek design with integrated subwoofer and Lenovo Enhanced Experience features like SlideNav and OneKey.  It's actually Microsoft Windows 7 Enhanced Experience certified, whatever that means.  We recently picked up two of these bad boys as our new daily machines and we've been purty happy ever since.  The biggest change for us was just the switch from Vista to Windows 7 -- much improved, still not perfect... obviously.  We debated on making the switch to Mac but decided against it (see controversial image above). We bought ours at Newegg. (Full disclosure, these are affiliate links above but we do in fact own and like these laptops.) The Good:
  1. Looks:  thin, sleek, the copper border around the top with the black textured lid looks great.  The white keyboard lights are a nice touch.
  2. Performance:  the processor is a monster, comes with 4GB of DDR3 (expandable to 8GB).  It boots/shuts down quickly, rarely any slow down.
  3. Keyboard feels good, the trackpad's great after you adjust the sensitivity settings (the Palm detector and pinch multi-touch zoom in particular need to be less sensitive)
  4. Great wifi card (Intel 5300 instead of Intel 5100)
  5. Has Bluetooth
  6. Built in Webcam
  7. Speakers are great for a laptop and it even has a mini-mini-mini subwoofer on the underside
  8. Has HDMI out
  9. Good battery life for such a powerful machine (~3 hours)
  10. Lightweight/portable
  11. 1GB of dedicated graphics, nice.
  12. Big 500GB hard drive
The Bad:
  1. Screen is only 16:9, not 16:10 so it's not true HD.
  2. No Bluray player (see #1)
  3. Comes preinstalled with a lot of junk... pretty standard these days, unfortunately.
  4. SlideNav is pretty useless, I just disabled it.  The pinch zoom is pretty useless too, be sure to lower the sensitivity.
  5. Hard drive is only 5400 RPM, this is the performance bottle neck of the system.
The Summary: We looked at other laptops (from HP, Dell, etc..) featuring the i7 processor but nobody could match the looks, price, and features of the Lenovo Y550P.  It has to be the best or one of the best laptops you can buy for ~$1,000.  If you spend some extra coin and put in a solid state drive and 8GB of RAM it would be an absolute monster laptop that is still cool looking and portable. (Full disclosure, these are affiliate links above but we do in fact own and like these laptops.) Specs from Newegg's website:
Model
Brand lenovo
Series IdeaPad
Model Y550P(324156U)
Part# 324156U
General
Operating System Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
CPU Type Intel Core i7 720QM(1.6GHz)
Screen 15.6"
Memory Size 4GB DDR3
Hard Disk 500GB
Optical Drive DVD±R/RW
Graphics Card NVIDIA GeForce GT 240M
Video Memory 1GB GDDR3
Communication Gigabit LAN and WLAN
Card slot 1 x Express Card
Dimensions 15.20" x 10.00" x 1.02" - 1.50"
Weight 6.06 lbs.
CPU
CPU Type Intel Core i7
CPU Speed 720QM(1.60GHz)
Display
Screen Size 15.6"
Wide Screen Support Yes
Resolution 1366 x 768
Operating Systems
Operating System Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Graphics
GPU/VPU NVIDIA GeForce GT 240M
Video Memory 1GB GDDR3
Graphic Type Dedicated Card
Hard Drive
HDD 500GB
HDD RPM 5400rpm
Memory
Memory 4GB
Memory Spec 2GB x 2
Memory Type 204-Pin DDR3 SO-DIMM
Memory Slot (Total) 2
Memory Slot (Available) 0
Optical Drive
Optical Drive Type DVD±R/RW
Optical Drive Interface Integrated
Communications
LAN 10/100/1000Mbps
WLAN 802.11n Wireless LAN
Ports
Card Slot 1 x Express Card
USB Two USB 2.0 and one eSATA/USB combo port
Video Port 1 x VGA, 1 x HDMI
Audio Ports 1 x Microphone jack; 1 x Headphone jack
Audio
Audio Integrated Sound card
Speaker Internal Speakers
Input Device
Touchpad Yes
Keyboard Standard
Supplemental Drive
Card Reader 6-in-1
Webcam Yes
Power
Battery 6-cell lithium ion
Physical spec
Dimensions 15.20" x 10.00" x 1.02" - 1.50"
Weight 6.06 lbs.
Manufacturer Warranty
Parts 1 year limited
Labor 1 year limited