I am a rare convert, I went from PC to MBP and back again. And deeply regret moving back to the MBP. Currently on an Asus UX31e (Zenbook), and whilst it looks quite cool and industrial, the keyboard sucks, the LCD is defective (and I'm currently arguing with Asus about warranty claims, but that's another story). So, excuse my cynicism surrounding the real 'quality' of other high end devices.
The hard drive is a pretty good point, the LTE/3G data connection + 1TB cloud storage could overcome this, but I live in Australia, so the data costs would be enormous. Also, I did run Ubuntu for a while on my MBP and it was ok, but there were some hardware issues (power management mostly).
I wasn't aware of the kernel issues, this could be a problem. Damn. :P