I agree with the comment that amd needs a better mobile chip, now that they've achieved a competitive desktop chip.
I have a compaq lappy I bought for $500 last year, actually it was $600 with MIR for $100. Turns out it was actually a 100 dollar visa gift card, so I felt a bit ripped off. I bought it at a radio shack, and I was able to use the card elsewhere, so it turned out ok, but still...
So it came with a QL-60 dual core at 1.9Ghz, 2gigs ram, gEFORCE 8200m, 15.4". I loaded windows 7 since it came with vista and I haven't looked back, it runs very well. Vista performed poorly.
Just for the experience, I played around with the idea of dropping a TurionX2 Ultra ZM-84 (2.3ghz I think). It's able to use ddr2 800mhz ram on the puma platform, I may still try this if I can find a deal. But what I noticed is that the processor in windows experience is just fine (5.0 or something along those lines) but my graphics are stuck at about 3.5. Ram is around 4.8 or something.
Anyway no matter what I do, the graphics are gonna be my bottleneck. Which it will be for any laptop I'm sure. Which begs the question, why the hell do you want to game on a notebook? Its not useful when on battery power, it will never be as good as your desktop, and there are always gonna be some games that you simply can't play on your laptop.
If you're planning on doing some serious gaming on your laptop, are you really gonna buy a $600-700 machine.?