Update - I canceled my Dell order. Couldn't get hold of right-person easily even after being on the phone for more than 30 min. Waiting on phone for customer support is the last thing I want to do in life.
After plenty of wasted hours on comparisons and reviews I have made a U-Turn from opting the fabulous Lenovo Thinkpad T61 and ordered Dell Vostro 1400.
I got the following configuration for $1550 including taxes and shipping.
OS - Vist Business. I was rooting for XP but was advised by my brother-in-law to go for Visa.
Processor - Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz with 2MB L2 cache
RAM - 3 GB. I need as much RAM as possible for memory-hungry IBM software.
Harddisk - 160 GB 5400 RPM.
Monitor - 14.1" . I have ordered with TrueLife. After what I read about it, I am going to change it to Matty while my order is still "in production". Also 14.1" has been my personal choice while shopping for laptops.
In the same price, I got integrated webcam, dedicated graphics card (i.e, discrete graphics) and 3-year warranty with accidental protection (i.e, complete care).
All in all, if you are budget-minded like I am and are willing to take 'risk' and don't have brand-image-consciousness then go for Dell. If you typically see yourself buy the premium-brands like BMW/Honda cars, Sony cameras, Bose headphones.... then Thinkpad may well be your choice.
Thinkpad is sleek, has great keyboard and proud history. However it doesn't come with s-video and has a weird placement of cntrl key (next to fn key). I can live with the higher-cost if they provide better customer support. I found that the order-processing is very slow with Lenovo. I hope everything else with Lenovo customer support is better.
