As a gaming laptop they're not great. The reason is that, for example, one model had a GTX 970M, which sounds good but the thermal performance is such that the GPU is near constantly throttled resulting in questionably worse performance than similarly sized and specked machines with a 960M part.

That's just poor thermal design. You know you just don't get that with MacBooks (you don't get a 970M either of course).

Personally I'm passing on this generation of MBPs. Will Apple wait another 2 years to update them? I'm just not convinced that this isn't now an iPod market for Apple.

Instead I ended up getting a Dell XPS 15. Having a Linux subsystem is pretty nice. It's nowhere near as polished as the Apple experience but for $1300 (including upgrades) I got the base machine and put a Samsung 950 Pro and 32GB of RAM into it, so that's nice.