Out of Pod Experience

Hm, I know ASUS and Razer make good gaming laptops. I'm not sure what your price range is, but Razer is a bit more on the expensive side, but they are, surprisingly, great quality machines. I've had an ASUS laptop for about 4 years now and after all the abuse I put this thing through, it's still chugging along like a champ. Fans have gotten a little loud, but that's about the only downside.

For specs, the only real things I can tell you to look out for are to promptly ignore anything with integrated graphics and keep in mind that, at least for NVidia, any graphics chipset followed by an M (for mobile) is about 1-2 generations behind their desktop counterpart. e.g. if you bought a laptop that said 760M GTX or whatever, it's probably equivalent to a desktop 560 GTX or 660 GTX. I forget the specifics. Either way, just keep it in mind and don't let the marketing bs fool you.