i wanted to love the XPS sooo much. they have a great linux team and it's damn near perfect were it not for two glaring flaws (imo):

1 - the webcam. what the hell? it's on the bottom right of the screen. if you videoconference often this will drive you insane -- the angle is so bad it borders on being useless

2 - the trackpad. (obv nothing matches apple here), but the xps in particular sucks (and oddly is not mentioned in any reviews i saw). for programmers, having the cursor randomly move while typing is just not acceptable.. from what I read the hardware was picking up noise from somewhere else in the system, causing jumps in the cursor. the latest drivers filter this noise in software, but this lead to increased latency. end result is weak. sold the machine :(