(I used to love Thinkpads, but this guy is right -- Lenovo cannot find a good supplier of screens. I heard this is because they will only use Chinese parts where possible, instead of Taiwanese, Japanese, or Korean parts. Needless to say, the Chinese cannot make LCDs.)
HP doesn't make good laptops, Dell doesn't make good laptops (they are good at making laptops whose batteries last for about 15 minutes after a few weeks or so), Apple is Apple (nice screens, same crap everywhere else), etc.
I might consider Asus next -- the eeepc 901 is the nicest laptop I've had. Nice screen. Unfortunately, the wireless card is a piece of shit that sometimes takes several tries to associate to WPA2 networks. "Known firmware issue." Great.
Basically, everyone wants cheap, cheap, cheap, and that's what they get. People that actually use computers are part of their profession and not just for watching porn are shit out of luck as a result.
(I will edit to add -- pricing things out, the desktop is an amazingly better value. For $2000, you can get a high-end Thinkpad with 2G of RAM, 2 cores, and a 160G SSD, etc. Or you can get a desktop with 8 cores, 16G of RAM, a 24" monitor, 4T of disk space, etc. Laptops are nice if you absolutely can't work at a desk. But if you can, you can save yourself a ton of money, and just use a netbook when traveling. I do this, but with a Thinkpad as my "desktop". It has not been undocked in years.)