When I needed to replace my last laptop, I chose a W500 Thinkpad (used). I like the variety of features & the docking station. Lot's of little touches such as USB charging with the machine powered off, both Cardbus & the newer type (whatever it's called), dual graphics cards (Intel on-board for low power & a more powerful AMD graphics card. It also has both touchpad & the IBM nipple.
One of the biggest factors was that new laptop screen resolutions are all in that bloody HD format. Even worse, most of them use a glossy screen. Glossy screens are an instant 'no sale' to me. My previous laptop was a 1600x1200 resolution and damned if I wanted to lose 10% vertical resolution when a large part of my use is writing documents & browsing the web. This W500 is the last of Lenovo's 1200 vertical pixel models *and* gains an extra 300+ pixels in width (1920x1200 vs 1600x1200).
It's a rather nice laptop!
Oh, and it came with Win7 Ultimate too. Not that I'm a Windows fan, but XP is no longer supported. Anyway, I mostly use Linux on it. About the only reason I keep Windows is to program the GPS data cards for an aircraft I manage.