Technicolour (Level 1)

The main reason I'm keen to swap Windows as the primary OS is for the superior command line.

I'm now tossing up between a MBA/P or one of the ThinkPad X series (which seem amazingly cheap)

Thanks for the advice @Mirado, I might just have to run my current laptop into the ground and keep an eye out on these new ultra-books and how well they play with Linux (and hopefully they will come to New Zealand).

My reasoning for OS X is that it has that extra polish that I want from an OS. Running something like Ubuntu is fine but it's not the same when you are used the extra finishing touching that something like Windows 7 or OS X brings.

Once you go MBP wouldn't the argument against running a seamless VM break down? My current laptop can do that fine now.

Having to reboot to change OS is a bit more taxing than I would prefer, plus partitioning is required, and when you've only got 128GB things get messy fast.

Also AFAIK NTFS on OSX isn't that great? And you definitely can't see HFS in Windows so it's not like you could go the other way for sharing files (to reduce the partition requirements)

Maybe a MBA isn't quite there yet for what I want it to do...

I currently have a late '08 era Dell Studio which is getting long in the tooth really, and things are starting to fail (such as the temperature sensor for the fans looks like has packed a sad so the cooling fans spin at 100% all the time).

So long story short, I'm starting to think it's in need of a replacement. I currently only really use my laptop at University (will be going into 4th year (Honours) Bachelor of Computer and Mathematical Sciences (BCMS) at University of Waikato (Yes in New Zealand, deal with it Norm)) so I'm not sure how good of an investment replacing my laptop now would be. I have a beefy desktop (2600k/8GB/560Ti) which I tend to use while at home.

For my Honours year, I'll be working on my Honours project, which looks like a *nix environment will be best suited. So I'm looking at the Macbook range (this is fairly major breakthrough from my die hard Windows attitude), however I do want to still be able to develop for .NET in the Visual Studio environment, so would a Macbook Air be very successful in running Windows 7 in a Virtual Machine? and even from there run and develop with Visual Studio very successfully?

Any advice in general about purchasing ultra-books would be highly valued (with added bonus if you're a developer of some type). I'm trying to start to get all my options so I can start giving it a good ponder.