Anybody care to chime in with a comment or hint on the laptop situation and-or their experiences?
I'm very happy with my Dell Precision 5520 "developer edition". It shipped with Ubuntu and runs Fedora pretty much flawlessly. I haven't tried CentOS, but Dell claims that RHEL support on their spec sheet, so I would expect it to work well.
Dell also have the XPS 13 "developer edition" for those looking for a smaller footprint.