Has the quality of Lenovo laptops really improved that much, or perhaps the quality of the competition has degraded so much that Lenovo is now king of the hill (according to the author)? Thinkpads were great under IBM, but deteriorated in quality quite a bit once Lenovo spun off.. Granted it has been 3 years since I've used one that was new (and it was crap), I've not heard of their quality improving that much since then.