Toshiba will ship flagship laptops with OpenSolaris
itexaminer.com
itexaminer.com
"I fear the Cisco experience has done unseen damage to Stanford in the form of creating inhibitions against sharing ideas, information and developments with possible commercial value among our groups which have need to benefit from each other's work."
Which is exactly what OSX is going against, with digital restrictions management, the appstore idea and the rest.
Given the choice of windows tax or an outdated intel platform, I'd rather go for this one -- it appears to be the only credible alternative to OS X, supposedly working out of the box with dtrace (w/o arbitrary iTunes sh*) and the rest: all being more or less open. Otherwise you need to rely on good luck with the wifi/suspend/resume/acpi etc.
If you're willing to use Solaris/Linux in VirtualBox on Windows (just run it fullscreen) then all the wireless/power management stuff is already solved too for less money upfront that buying a MacBook, you can just use a cheap Dell.
You are also right about the cheap Dell: they do have ubuntu, but price/performance pales in comparison to say, Vista. I can only hope, that the Japanese market will embrace this product -- they generally have one of the strongest FreeBSD culture, which might be enough for the kickstart.