Dell M1330, Defective GFX cards, and Laptops

I've been planning to buy a new laptop for a few months now. What I want:

• a small laptop, please note that this does not necessarily mean thin - it means easy to open and use reasonably comfortably on an air plane,
  
• light-weight (sub 4lbs)
  
• A hardware accelerated graphics card with dedicated memory
• An SSD option.
  
• Reasonable battery life. No, an upper limit of 3-hours isn't reasonable. I'd like something that can last for a long plane ride.
• Resolution is important to me, I can't work in a 1024x768 or something similar. I currently have 1680x1050 and I wouldn't want to lose much in the terms of screen real estate. (I know this conflicts with my want of a light laptop, but a guy can dream, can't he?)

8 months ago, someone introduced me to the Dell XPS m1210 [1]. And it quickly became the top competitor on my list of laptops that I was considering. I couldn't afford it at the time, so I kept my eye on it. Soon, dell replaced this model with the XPS M1330 [2] which was even more appealing. But recently I've found out that the nvidia g84 and g86 are defective [3]. The Dell m1330 is one of the laptops with this card [4]. So that got me to thinking of not ordering the m1330 with the nvidia card. I mean, if portability is my ultimate goal, the graphics card conflicts with that. I could order it with the integrated Intel card, but there are a number of laptops out there with this card which are more portable.

So I got to looking around and I ran across the as of yet unreleased Sony Vaio Z Series [5]. Wow, what a sweet laptop. It actually satisifies ALL of my requirements and more. It's a high powered, very light machine with a great screen, dual SSD drives (w/ raid) and great battery life (or so they claim). Too bad it's $4k. Any other suggestions?

[1] - http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=2965&review=XPS+M1210+Review
[2] - http://www1.ca.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/xpsnb_m1330?c=ca&cs=cadhs1&l=en&s=dhs
[3] - http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/07/09/nvidia-g84-g86-bad
[4] - http://direct2dell.com/one2one/archive/2008/08/08/latest-on-the-nvidia-gpu-issue-for-dell-laptop-customers.aspx
[5] - http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10551&storeId=10151&langId=-1&productId=8198552921665415900