How does that not make sense. Anyway you look at it, you spent way more for the asus than the msi. While maintaining almost identical specs on your asus, an msi could've offered way more for less. And your dads, you spent the same for asus with 870m as you could've a 880m.
MSI depending on country does offer 2 year warrenty. But if you read any msi forums, their warrenty isn't perfect, but yes it does give 2 years.
Upgrading, at the cost of $600 for a 860m and $800 for an 870m, I think you'd be better off just purchasing a new laptop years down the road. You can only upgrade on the exisiting motherboard socket. Leaving you with 4800/4930 for cpu, or 860m/870m/880m. The processor is yes faster, and yes only concerning when running virtual machines, video editing or heavy work. But what you fail to realize, is that any of that work puts 100% load on cpu and a great deal on gpu, which if you read any forum positive msi or not, will result in thermal throttling. Thereby making any excuse the processor is better, useless since you wont have the full potential anyways. You yourself chose asus, twice. Reguardless of price. The 860m has been the largest single processor performance leap ever known to mobile gpu's. Typical upgrades yield 10-20% performance over the last generation. The 860m not only beat that, but also surpassed the 770m by a solid 10%. You say the 870m is just worth the upgrade no matter what basically, and use 30% for your figures. Yes if the 770m vs 780m yielded a 20% performance increase, and the 870m is still less powerful than the 780m, and the 860m is 10% more powerful than the 770m. I just don't get how or why the 870m could be that huge a difference. I give examples, websites, ect showing the fps is minimal, yet you say oh I don't use that site, or oh this or that. Bring up battery and you throw a website not even used, as an example of why the msi is equal, even though I can give you over 10 other well documented and respected sites that show otherwise. You say an 870m can run ultra on anything, yet it cant. It edges out the 860m yes, but it doesn't run every game at ultra. Why is it that if you go to websites to read user reviews on the laptops I can rarely find more than a few (counted on a single hand) that rated their msi, yet the asus is just loaded on every site. At $1400 budget, choice between asus g750 jm will result in well over 50-75 user reviews, yet msi gt70 maybe 10. If it were that great a deal and just undoubtable beats out the asus, why do more people go asus? You can say and be correct by saying that not every person that buys a laptop will review it. But normally if its great, people do. Normally if theres plenty wrong with it, people do. But that works both ways, asus and msi. You yourself chose asus reguardless of price or not. Saying budget was unlimited, but chose asus even though msi would've offered more. Excuses or not, you did chose lower spec'd asus over higher spec's msi, yet unwittingly telling OP to go msi or go home. You back up msi like you have stock it in, yet don't even chose that laptop out of 2 purchases?