The Mac Pro is dead. Many audio and video guys I know have already switched to PC or built / bought a Hackintosh.

You probably not know that many pro audio and video guys then...

That's why you build your own. http://tonymacx86.com/. Twice the power that Apple provides for half the price. Stability is not compromised, just the Apple tower design.

Very minor bump: http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/11/3078180/apple-incrementall...

I know a dude who's done fulltime HD video editing with a MacBook Pro for years. Not 2K or 4K though. Out of curiosity, have you tried editing video with a top-of-the-line MBP and been frustrated? For special effects/render-heavy stuff I know you can never have enough cycles, but for typical editing I'd be surprised to hear that recent laptops cause much of a bottleneck.

Currently here are my bottlenecks in HD editing on my mid 2011 MBP (which I have a LaCie Firewire 800 raid 1 hooked to).

1- The transcode from h.264 (what my D7000 outputs) to Prores 2- Transitions, overlays and basic comp'ing effects 3- Export from FCP 4- Transcoding from Prores to h.264 again

The editing itself, no, it isn't that bad really anymore. On my old Macbook Pro (2009 model?) it was pretty hard still. Yet, everything surrounding the render is just terrible. I feel that with a 16/32 core Mac Pro, 64GB+ of RAM that that many of these problems would go away. I saw where someone had built a Hackintosh the other day that was 16/32 cores and 128GB RAM... which is very tempting currently.

Thanks! That makes sense. I could be wrong, but I think a lot of this is because FCP 4 doesn't speak h.264 and doesn't take good advantage of the hardware. When/if you can switch to FCP X or a modern competitor (not saying that's an option yet, necessarily), I wouldn't be surprised to hear that most of these annoyances go away.