It doesn't take "experience" to get a good laptop in a tight package that runs quick; it takes the appropriate amount of money.
In the case of more budget minded laptops, there will be performance compromises in the interest of keeping costs down to a minimum. In other cases it will be a compromise in terms of packaging. The initial Intel based quadcore laptops (like the Toshiba Qosimo) were so ridiculously large and heavy only a LAN party gamer would consider them portable.
There are good slim form options in the PC market with the current Sandy Bridge based laptops though. This includes the Core i7 Quads as they are simply more efficient than the last generation.
If start up time is to be any sort of guage for performance (not the best guage by any measure; it's almost exclusively a measure of disk performance), any laptop will be greatly improved with a SSD boot drive.
I noticed this on a current model MacBook Air and was so impressed by the performance (fast boot time, near instant program load times) considering the extremely middling CPU and graphics chip that I opted to take a hit on storage and chose an SSD in a built to order MBP. Boot time from pressing the power button to desktop is about 12 seconds. Power down takes between 1-2 seconds.
(edit: more like 15 seconds boot time, 3-4 seconds shut down upon measuring)
Another thing that's not often brought into consideration regarding Macs is that there's a real secondary market for them. $900 received for my old 2.4Ghz C2D/256MB GT 9600 M that I paid about $1,300 for back in the Fall of 2009 from a Mac reseller, not an individual party.
