"Winter" and regional definitions thereof

When visiting other parts of the United States remember to keep in mind that local weather may be different from what you're used to. For example, even if you've spent 20 years living in California, ordinary November evenings in Chicago do tend to drop significantly below the otherwise frigid temperature of 50 Fahrenheit. Please dress accordingly.

(Maybe my parents are getting scarves for $WINTER_HOLIDAY.)

Preliminary laptop shopping

It's been suggested that, if I don't like the way the wireless on my current laptop keeps falling over, I'd like a higher-resolution screen, and I'd like the whole thing to be lighter in general, I might consider laptop shopping again. I tend to do low-to-moderate-grade coding and playing (frequently graphics-intensive) Windows-based games. Dual-booting is a pain, but I can't deal with a pure-Windows environment. Leading contenders seem to be the 15" MacBook Pro and the Lenovo ThinkPad T61p with appropriate options.

At a first glance the MacBook is significantly more expensive. A lot of this is because it's just a nicer machine, though: 2 GB of RAM vs. 1 default on the ThinkPad, a bigger hard drive, Bluetooth by default, and so on. Beefing up the ThinkPad to roughly equivalent specs brings it to within $100 of the MacBook (and I probably want the extended battery that makes up the difference). The ThinkPad has a nicer screen (1680x1050 vs. 1440x900, both 16:10 aspect ratios), the Mac is far more likely to Just Work including things like suspend support where the ThinkPad is known to be particularly bleeding-edge here.

Any thoughts from the peanut gallery? Do I care about things like Bluetooth, particularly if I think there's an iPhone in my future too? Will I be able to readily install random software libraries and compilers on the Mac?