For my needs, the difference in the processor and video card are pretty minute. There might be a bigger difference in the video card but from what I've been reading on the notebookreview forums, they are pretty comprable with some people even getting 8600 benchmark scores with the 8400 (with some tweaking). To get the 256mb 8600 I'd have to get the 2,499 MBP.

The screen resolution is a pretty big difference but the LCD on the Sony is pretty amazing. They've got some xbrite crap they incorporated from the Bravia tv's that really makes it pop. As far as size, the MBP is not insanely smaller than the FZ1, they are basically in the same ballpark. The lack of bluetooth is definitely crappy but I don't think I'm going to miss the 1000BASE-T too much. On the other hand, having a portable blueray player with HDMI out is pretty sweet. Also, I tend to backup a lot of stuff so the Blueray writer should also be nice.

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What does being creative have to do about buying a computer?

Well the fact that half of their selling point seems to be all the crazy, wacky creative shit you can do on your laptop. When they constantly throw that in your face, its gonna get the customer thinking about how much of that stuff they actually do, at least it got me thinking about it. Well it turns out I dont do very much blogging, music making, video editing or photo editing. So the fact that it comes installed with all these great and powerful software titles doesn't mean a whole lot to me. I'd be paying for but not really using them.

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I switched because doing common computer tasks was easier in the sense that I didn't have to deal with operating the computer as much, and could just get work done

I guess I'm just not a very hardcore computer user because I found that the stuff I needed to do was pretty straightforward in XP. I don't think I've ever been one of those users that found Windows to be overly burdensome for my own personal needs. Drivers did their thing for the most part, programs behaved as expected and went shit went wrong, I was usually able to figure it out. It'd be great if I were uber enough to just drop into UNIX and do what I need to do cause Macs are just cool like that but I'd have no idea what I'm doing.

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Plug in a camera, and photos get pulled off it and organized. No manual folder management, etc.

I'm not exactly sure how iPhoto does it but I'd just like to take this space to give another plug to Picasa. Managing my wifes pics used to b a pain in the ass but they've made that program pretty retard proof and now even she is uploading her albums to Picasa and whatnot without any assistance. Pictures come in from the camera and get nicely sorted in Picasa.

There are definitely a couple of things that I'm envious of in the MBP but not enough to make me want to switch.