I have a HP notebook somewhere around here. It's an Elitebook 8740 that I requested for its "dreamcolor" display. I haven't had any major issues with it or previous HPs in the past 5 years; I will concede that they've been business machines so any minor repairs I had were handled expeditiously.
I actually have the Dell equivalent, Studio XPS 16, of the unit you purchased sitting on my desk right now. I usually keep it here for a few small tasks because it looks good. I picked it up after seeing it featured on tv ads and at various trade shows.
The performance is quite good; and I've had no problems with the ATI graphics whatsoever. It won't play any current titles on high, since the graphics are a bit dated compared to the monster that's in the ASUS and also in the current generation Alienware 17" notebook. However, medium plays nicely with very few hickups. The graphics card in HP you ordered is a slight bit faster so it should have less issues playing games on med to high. If you're moving from an older notebook to this one, the graphics performance should be a pleasant surprise.
Just something I wanted to mention...
Small caveat: I didn't add this info before since Intel was in the process of releasing a fixed version of their hardware.
Assuming you were to wait a while as you intimated, I would have suggested waiting for the Sandy Bridge CPU upgrades that manufacturers are starting to push out. The upgrade primarily affects CPU performance and not graphics. There is a very significant increase to CPU performance and battery life on Sandy Bridge notebooks. It should have been released already, but many OEMs pulled their offerings after Intel announced a bug in their chipset. Its bad of me to make you second guess your purchase after you've already made it. But I wanted to let you know in case this affects your opinion of the machine since this upgrade will begin showing up on manufacturer websites around the time you machine ships. Hopefully now, it won't come as a surprise. If this is something you definitely would consider I assume HP will still allow you to cancel at this stage on the build process.
