I was always a big fan of Sager laptops. Both Icthus and Gilga had one, I wonder if they would still recommend them.
The Sager was pretty good, but I found that 1) I didn't like the keyboard and 2) it ran REALLY hot. Like so hot it burned out the mobo and I had to get it replaced. Now, they were really nice about replacing it and all, but still, the adventure taught me that with laptop buying, the overall experience isn't just the sum of the component parts like in desktop buying. Form factor and thermals are a much bigger deal.
My next laptop after the Sager was an Alienware M11X, which I love. You could pick up the stock M11X for $800 (less if you can swing a student discount or your company has a premier account with Dell) and the specs aren't that far off the ASUS you linked. In fact the CPU is identical to my M11X R1 ... more CPU options are available now. You'd get a tigher gaming machine, but with a smaller screen. Which brings us right to the tradeoffs with an M11X. It can definitely handle WoW, definitely handle SC2. The battery life is phenomenal, even using the discrete graphics card (like 4+ hours). But a) playing WoW on an 11-inch screen has its drawbacks, b) that CPU is a slow CPU. You can overclock it but it's still just 1.7 GHz and that's just slow. So I generally run wow on "good" settings ... it can handle High but FPS drops to teens to twenties and at Good its' consistently 30+. Also, I attach it to a 24" monitor sometimes at higher resolution, and it definitely chokes on high with that. No problem with 10-man raids running grid, omen, and recount ... I haven't tried 25-man raids. I got mine with a built-in 3G card so in theory I could be wowing while off on some park bench somewhere ... but i never woudl because the glossy screen can't be seen outside in daylight. Anyhow, it's a nice machine for WoW. But the small screen can be rough, the CPU means you can't get the high performance you said you wanted. And it doesn't have an optical drive, you'd have to connect an optical one. The M11X has the same sort of "switchable" graphics that you mention with the Asus. I find that I always leave the graphics in high-power mode, that I don't use the low-power setting. But that's just me, I always forget to pop my trinkets as well...
Right now I'm in the market for a "home laptop" (apparently playing WoW while my wife is watching Army Wives is not good husbandly behavior, and of course my desktop is in the room where the good TV is ... sigh) and have been looking for ideal WoW specs, e.g. Ultra Graphics. And interestingly, because WoW is an "old game" ... it's very CPU dependent. Any graphics card from the last 18 months will get you all you need. SLI/Crossfire graphics does zilch for WoW apparently. But having a fast processor DOES help. And fast means "high GHz" ... not quad core. Because WoW is an "old" program, it's essentially one big thread ... it'll throw a few things on a dual core processor but a quad core doesn't help. If you look at laptops CPUs, quad cores tend to be kinda slow, although the Intel ones have "turbo mode" to compensate. General feeling I get is that to maximize WoW, don't depend on any bells and whistles (e.g. turbo mode, multithreading, multi-GPUs) ... just go for the basics. Anyhow, the point of all this is that to maximize WoW, get a faster CPU than the SU7300. But that will directly contradict the "long battery life" you're also looking for. So that's a trade you'll just have to make. But anyhow, with WoW ... not every max laptop spec will get you the WoW performance boost you expect. Alienware and WoW forums are littered with folks with serious Alienware M17X's with quad cores processors and crossfire who get 20-30 fps ... partly because of config problems, but partly because their systems invest in technology that doesn't help WoW.
Other notion is, especially if you are looking for high settings, the laptop will get hot. So make sure it's a laptop designed with good thermals (e.g. vents out the back, lots of vents, graphics card and CPU NOT located directly under your wrists) ... and/or plan on playing it with a cooling pad of some sort. Again, that's a tradeoff, what's the point of a good form factor laptop if you have to lug around a cooling pad as well. M11x doesn't need a cooling pad in my experience. The Sager definitely should have had one.
Anyhow, what I'm aiming to get in a new laptop is ... the fastest base clock speed processor for the money (which will end up being the oddly number i7-620QM it looks like), non-SLI graphics, and a big, high-resolution screen. I have also heard that WoW is dependent on hard drive speeds (no surprise when you think about all the loading that has to happen) and that SSD drives can have a huge impact, so I'm planning on swapping out the stock hard drive with an Intel SSD (most OEMs, apparently, only offer Samsung SSDs and everything I read said they degrade quickly). Generally WoW-performance theme I've hit upon is: CPU clock speed important, hard drive speed important, graphics card not essential so long as it's anything made in the last 12-18 months, and memory not important so long as you have more than 2GB. Some of these trends are reiterated in Gamespot's WoW performance guide if you want to goodgle that. With those WoW considerations ... you can figure out the rest based on what your personal/other priorities are.
Last factor: Cataclysm hasn't released specs yet ... but they've made it kinda clear that they're not rewriting the WoW engine so most of the above won't change much, if at all. Cata is adding some "cool water effects" so presumably there'll be a little more work for the graphics card or multi-cores, but I sure as heck wouldn't spec a computer just around water effects.
There's my two cents.
"Been way too long since I threw up a Wall of Text" Gilga
