Some updates:

- Got the Gateway M275 in the mail and set it up with Win7.
- Gateway working well, and almost every bit of hardware on the device had a Win7 driver automatically installed by the OS. Nice. Except the video driver...
- Getting a working video driver on Win7 was a bit of a pain. Turns out that Intel doesn't support that model of video chip on later OS's at all and you have to hack the XP driver to work on Win7: http://www.groundstate.net/855GMWin7.html
- Gateway off-axis viewing has exactly the same issues as the Toshiba Satellite R15. The anti-aliasing turns into a rainbow at off-axis angles. Forcing the text to green-on-black helps, but then you've got the contrast issues with the in-between shades of green: From Vixy's side the letters disappear because the antialiased pixels disappear, and from my side the letters get blobby because the antialiased pixels turn to full brightness. Adjusting the contrast makes it better for one side at the expense of the other. BUT! I have a solution that will work on either PC (see below).
- Gateway PC also has a sort of a "wash" effect on the screen at off-axis angles that I don't seem to recall the Toshiba had as badly.
- Gateway PC is lighter and thinner than the Toshiba despite having the same specs.
- Toshiba PC had enough extra space in the casing that I could cut mounting bracket slots directly into its case. For the Gateway, I had to fashion a "cradle" for it out of foamed PVC sheet.
- Toshiba PC, running XP, had some issues with hibernate/resume (pen calibration no longer works after resume), so I'm currently reformatting the Toshiba to see if it functions better under Win7.

How I solved the antialiasing problem...
- Turn off antialiasing. Then it doesn't matter what angle you view the font at, it's always pixels 100 percent on or 100 percent off. Then the font looks the same no matter what angle you view it at.
- PROBLEM: Even when you turn off antialiasing in the OS, Microsoft Word still displays its text antialiased. (SERIOUSLY GUYS? YOUR FLAGSHIP PRODUCT IGNORES YOUR OWN OS'S GLOBAL SETTING FOR ANTIALIASING? GAH!)
- HOW TO FIX:
-- First you have to turn off ClearType. Control Panel - Hardware And Sound - Display - Press "Adjust ClearType Text" in the sidebar.
-- Then you have to turn off Antialiasing altogehter. Run SYSDM.CPL - "Advanced" tab - Press "Performance" - Uncheck "Smooth edges of screen fonts", apply.
-- Now the OS has antialiasing turned off but Microsoft Word still has it turned on. Now you must force Word to obey the system's antialiasing setting by editing the system registry.
Word 2003
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Word\Options
Word 2007
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\RespectSystemFontSmooth
New DWORD Value, NoClearTypeNW, set value to 1 and then the next time you run Word it will respect the fact that you turned off antialiasing in the OS.

I tested this out with Vixy and she (finally) liked it. There's a chance we'll be using this setup (not sure which PC yet, I'm still installing Win7 on the Toshiba) at our next gig. Crossing fingers!