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Only one way to go at that price...Toshiba.
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I've used both Toshibas and Dells and far and above prefer the Toshiba machines. To me they have a better layout. Never really dealt with Toshiba's technical support line, as any of the corporate Toshiba laptops we had a problem with that were under warranty, we had a third party Toshiba repair center that would just overnight us the parts we asked for, or we would just send the unit to them.
Dell was a pain in the rear. Their call center is in India and South America, unless you are a corporate customer and then you may get a US based call center. Good luck understanding those people. The Dell website is a real pain in the neck to get updates from compared to Toshiba's. The on-site service from Dell isn't an actual Dell person that comes out. The technical support center will have a part sent to your location via Airborne Express, and then either later that day or the next a contractor from TRW or similar will show up to install the part, unless you know how to do it yourself.
Most laptops, however, if not abused should hold up for a while. The biggest problem I have with laptops (on a corporate support level) is hard drives going bad. This is usually caused by being left in very hot or very cold cars or being bumped hard or dropped while the system is use. I've seen a similar number of hard drive failures between Dells and Toshibas--the two types of laptops I was responsible for corporate level support for. Unfortuanately the hard drive contains all your programs and saved files. So if it goes, they go. No company will warranty the data you have on the hard drive should their hard drive fail. Your safest bet is to keep backups or be prepared to pay considerably to a company like OnTrac to have your data recovered from a dead hard drive. If the drive isn't completely dead, most any repair shop can salvage whatever data is on there minus perhaps a few files that may have been hit for an hour or two of shop labor.
No real experience with Gateways. We were doing an analysis one time to change corporate standard laptops at one company from Toshibas to either Dell or Gateways. Gateway was the first dismissed from the evaluation, though for what exact reasons I do not know.
Otherwise I'd steer clear of any of the other machines. Unless you really have the extra money then perhaps Alien Ware systems. No direct experience with them, but the owners of them I have talked to have been happy with them.
