Are you looking at my OP or my most recent link?

OP. People have mentioned Lenovo, best bang for the buck.

The new UHD one with GTX 860 is especially cool. It also has a 8GB SSHD to speed up boot-times, which is a godsend. Not quite a replacement for a stand-alone SSD, but close enough

Unfortunately in Australia Lenovo is far more expensive than the USA

Ah, gotcha. What manufacturers are relatively reasonable there overall? Sorry, not too knowledgable of the PC market in AUS.

Well, here's a Lenovo laptop not too much more expensive than the one in your OP. It has a better processor and a better graphics chip.

It's not nearly as great a value as the UHD is in the USA, but still something to consider.

Not a problem. Unfortunately, it doesn't matter who you buy from in Australia laptops are way over priced. But most warranties are not international, so where we do import a lot of parts wholesale for PCs, for laptops we pretty much suck it up in case we wind up with a busted laptop and hundreds in shipping costs to get it fixed.

http://www.metabox.com.au/store/

This retailer does custom laptops with a reputation for solid building and I am currently looking at buying from them. Spec for spec I can get about $3-500 cheaper than the lenovo website. Will it have all the nice trimmings of a Lenovo touchpad? Maybe not. But we just get so screwed on price that at some point you have to say enough is enough.

If you're interested I'd be more than happy for you to have a fiddle with the site and recommend something better.

At this stage I have two options I am looking at (both are way over my original budget, which makes me think I'll go with the cheaper one, and maybe even cut something from that).

Metabox Alpha W355SS  ($2076 AUD)
Standard Metabox Design
15.6" FHD (1920 x 1080) LED Matte 95 Gamut
Nvidia GeForce GTX 860M with 2GB GDDR5 VRAM
Intel Core i7-4710MQ Processor (6M Cache up to 3.50 GHz)
16GB 1600MHZ Memory
Plextor 256GB M5 PRO XTREME SATA3 SSD
1TB 7200RPM HDD
Intel 7260 AC Dual Band Wireless
DVD +- R/RW DL
Windows 8.1 64BIT
2 Year Platinum Metabox Onsite Pickup
Standard Insured Delivery 4-7 Days

Office Home + Student 2013

Metabox Alpha W355SS-CTG02 ($1843 AUD)
Standard Metabox Design
15.6" FHD (1920 x 1080) LED Matte
Nvidia GeForce GTX 860M with 2GB GDDR5 VRAM
Intel Core i7-4710MQ Processor (6M Cache up to 3.50 GHz)
16GB 1600MHZ Memory
Plextor 256GB M5 PRO XTREME SATA3 SSD
1TB 7200RPM HDD
802.11ABGN / Bluetooth
Blu-ray Reader / DVD +- R/RW DL
Windows 8.1 64BIT
2 Year Platinum Metabox Onsite Pickup
Standard Insured Delivery 4-7 Days

Office Home + Student 2013

Hmm. This is actually a pretty good deal that's a lot cheaper than those and should be more than satisfactory

No SSD, but those are technically uneccessary overall (even though boot time is much, much faster with SSDs). The graphics is perfectly fine (the 850 should eat up any modern game you throw at it on at least high). You only need 8gb of memory, no need to pay for more. Blu-ray readers are also essentially worthless, unless you have a large collection of movies, and even then you should stick to a traditional blu-ray player.

You think? I tend to get tunnel vision, most of the benchmarks I have read put the 860M about 30% more powerful than the 850M...but then its hard to envision how that plays out in the real world.

I will take your advice on the RAM...I really have no clue...as long as it runs Civ 6 without enormous between turn wait times :P

I have no interest in blu-ray though, agreed.

Finally, SSD...you really dont think its worth bothering?

The 860 is more powerful, but in the end it'll probably be out of your pricepoint. Either way there's always something more powerful, so you'll eventually have to settle for something. The 850 will easily max out Civ 6 and most other modern games, and it should be able to play games on at least medium for another three years or so. 

Yeah, at this point pretty much no game uses 8gb of RAM. Heck, most don't even use 4. 

SSDs are nice, I have one in my desktop, but they aren't necessary. I personally don't have one in my laptop because laptop SSDs tend to be obscenely expensive overall. The boot time will be slower, but Windows 8 isn't that resource-intensive so it won't be that bad at all, maybe three or four minutes to boot up completely. As long as you simply put it into sleep mode instead of turning it off, you probably won't even notice that you don't have an SSD.