Well, I bought a ZBook from HP in January 2014 because of these Features:
1. All the laptops I worked with (my company's or my own) were HP and they were good. They were of the Compaq lineage, not the consumer specs.
2. They have on site next business day support as long as I pay a warranty. That was less than 100 Euro for the first three years. I don't have to bring the laptop somewhere or leave it there for days or weeks.
3. I can open it and replace basically every single part.
4. I knew it would run Linux reasonably well. That means perfectly as long as I don't care that shutdown is a reboot and I have to long press the power button at the BIOS screen to actually shutdown. Maybe I didn't shutdown once since January this year.
5. It has three physical buttons on the touchpad. I wish it didn't have the numberpad.
6. It could accommodate up to 32 GB, which it has now. Plus 2 SSDs, 3 TB total. It came with a 750 GB HDD.
So, these are the kind of features I care about. Software gimmicks in the BIOS not really, nor weird multimedia buttons.