I've got to agree, I convinced my girlfriend to buy a thinkpad, only to find that IBM's website and priceing structure were far more arcane than Dells, which I thought was bad enough. With Dell, you price out your laptop in the four available stores, apply all coupons and see where you are. With IBM, there's only one store, but every model has who knows how many different variants, and each variant allows different things to be customized. The different variants are not all centrally linked.

I didn't deal with them on the phone, but I hear the salespeople are helpfull, so you might as well give them a call. The telephone support post-purchase was very quick and helpful on the only minor issue the machine has had so far. Why more companies don't go to the "submit request online, get a call back in half an hour from the support rep" I don't know.

In short, good machine, good support, bad website.

Matthew