> This workstation can get some serious work done, but its battery life of 5 hours and 34 minutes means you likely won't be taking it far from your desk.
The 13" rMBP gets 12 hours on the same test: http://www.laptopmag.com/articles/all-day-strong-longest-las....
I don't feel like I'm being unreasonably picky here. I've been using a laptop with a great display and 8-9 hours of actual battery life for the last two years. Everything on the market right now (including probably the new MBP) is a downgrade from that.
There is a lot of trackpad jitter as well - which is easy to disable when a mouse is plugged in, but still.
edit: the camera is also in a stupid place.
OS X vs. Windows?
Meh. The one on my 2015 X1 Carbon is okay, but the keyboard and trackpoint are the worst parts of my X1 Yoga – the trackpoint only allows the "soft dome" caps (i.e. the convex ones, not the nice concave ones which save you a bunch of stress in the fingers) and the keyboard just feels very cheap and weird. The keypress is still well-defined, it’s just that the keys are incredibly shallow.
$2000 - A loaded Dell Precision workstation. Wait for Kaby Lake quads though. If you like the Surface Books that's an option too.
$1500 - Dell XPS.
$1200 - ASUS UX501VW. (Only one RAM slot is upgradable, though)
If you have forgiven Lenovo after last year's man-in-the-middle scandal, they continue to make the best keyboards.
All of these machines run Linux well (with an occasional driver compile). The biggest tradeoff will be the touchpad. I find the trackpads on par with my 2009 unibody White Macbook. If you prefer a mouse like I do, it wouldn't be that much of an issue. On the plus side, you can get much better specs for the price of a Mac. Xeons, lots of ECC RAM, beter displays, better battery etc etc.