Besides the ultraportable, other folks have been asking me for the classic desktop replacement. Big and heavy at 6 pounds, but with a huge 15-17″ screen. These are great for music and video editing for consumer.
As usual, reliability is the number one criteria, but the other ones are screen size and quality, DVD writeable drive, lots of memory (512MB-1GB), a fast hard drive (7200 rpm is ideal). You are giving up on weight and battery life though, but that’s the tradeoff. Pretty much standard these days are Wifi, Ethernet, etc.
Here are some choices:
AnandTech: HP Pavilion DV1000 Entertainment Notebook PC – Multimedia Notebook A Breed Apart. This is a 15″ notebook, but Anandtech liked it. I don’t know about reliability though.