I have finally managed to narrow my list of potential ultraportable laptops to buy to just a few;

1) Sony Vaio TT - £1124 w/ 3 yrs warranty
At only 11.1" screen size this is the most portable of the lot. The huge pluses are the carbon fibre chassis, isolated keyboard, dvd drive and it even has space for an HDMI port. The use of the ULV core 2 duos at 1.2GHz gives it a very healthy battery life of 9 hrs.

2) Lenovo Thinkpad X200 - £1194 w/ 3 yrs warranty
This is bit bigger than the Vaio but still very portable. The Mg-alloy chassis along with its roll cage makes this probably the most robust of the lot. The keyboard is as you would expect from a Thinkpad excellent. The use of LV core 2 duos at 1.86GHz still makes this laptop have a respectable battery life of approximately 6 hrs, but still no where near the Vaio. The lack of a built in optical drive is not too bad since I hardly ever use it and it's just one less thing to break.

3) Apple Macbook Pro (13.1") - £1094 w/ 3 yrs warranty
I can't believe that a Macbook Pro made my short list, but given the specs it was hard to not consider it. The new 2009 Macbook Pros have an exceptional battery life of 7 hrs considering they aren't even using the ULV/LV core 2 duos. The nvidia 9400 that it uses edges out the Intel X4500MHD used by the other two. My "only" concern is the the performance of the trackpad in Windows. I have two programs, SPSS Clementine and Minitab which I must be able to use but they can only run in Windows. I have heard how the trackpad is unusable in Windows via Bootcamp. Can someone please confirm. Also, a workround for right clicking in Windows would be great. If this can't be resolved, then this will be the first to drop off the list.

I won't consider any laptop from HP (I use these at work and hate it), Samsung, Fujitsu, Acer or Toshiba (the build quality of the Porteges aren't exactly great imo)