Just bought a HP 510 770 (Actually its a 780 apparently).
Would be considered to be at the low end of the market, £350 or less.
Intel Centrino, 2.26ghz 512 ram, dvd burner, 15 " brightview, 2 usb, wireless.
Having dumped the supplied software, Xp Home and installed Xp Proff, plus downloaded latest video driver, i am amazed how good it is.
Runs Flightsim 2002 smoothly without any problems, better than the Athlon and nvidia desktop i am using now with 1gb of ram. Would be quite happy to dump the desktop. So far the few games i have loaded run smoothly. They are only a couple of years old.
Also downloaded latest codec for watching video (Try cccp). All the HDTV, 720p stuff i have downloaded from..(cough) p2p, runs superbly.
Only downside it has only a mono speaker, (spoil the ship for a peneth a tar, as my Dad would say). Does have stereo earphone socket.
Cannot see what a £900 laptop would do any better than this. Battery time could be a bit longer, 1.5 hours currently.