I got mine in Singapore about 9 months ago, so its probably outdated and I won't bore you with the specs. What was advanced then is probably standard now. It is a Dell Inspiron widescreen Centrino and I took most of the hardware and software upgrades - RAM, hard disk, XP Professional, Office etc. Its a desktop replacement, so a bit heavy with DVD writer etc and not great if you have a job that requires you to walk with it all day. But it comes in an excellent Dell backpack, in which you can pack a few other things as well for a flight.
The light weight ones are more expensive and have less hardware and they probably won't qualify as "everything I can do at home". I did check out almost everything else that was available including the small notebook discounters at Slim Lim square and I couldn't beat the "price to features ratio" of a Dell at the time.
All in just over 2K Sing and I am pretty happy with it. Did need a telephone service in a 3rd country (wasn't the computer's fault, but the networks). Called up dell service from the yellow pages and they checked the serial number were quite helpfull and ran through the diagonistics with me.