I came here to post on Brazilian prices, too. Luckily, it's not like buying a(n imported) car, in which case I would basically never buy one. To the point that I'm leaning on the side of buying an MBA here, it's not the end of the world if I have to pay 500US more (entry-level MBA here is actually R$3000/US$1500, according to Apple's Brazil site). It sucks...but everyone travels with their own computers these days so getting someone to bring one for me from the States is not likely.

Isn't Apple working on manufacturing iPads in Brazil to avoid import taxes?

The iPad 3 is still priced at R$1599, iPad 2 R$1299, which is not that bad. Apparently they are already producing iPhones over there, but the price hasn't been affected.

Could also compare to car prices or average monthly income...

At least if we could buy the used ones that will appear on eBay...

We do have AWS in Brazil now, though.

If, for some reason, you are using AWS as shorthand for Amazon's general site, they haven't landed here yet, but I'm very interested to see their entrance into the market and how they perform against Ponto Frio, Submarino, MercadoLivre, etc.

Brazil really needs centralized sites (Amazon, CL, etc) because having to check dozens of sites and services just to maybe find something similar to what you need, it can get tedious...and I'm sure I'm not the only one. At least there's Estante Virtual for used books. That's a great service.

As long as we're on the subject, it'd be really nice if there was a way for non-Brazilians to buy things online here. This would be solved if PayPal upped their marketing and really made themselves known on the Brazilian market.

No, I mean't the webservices. If Amazon came to Brazil I really wish they'd disrupt the market in terms of customer service. Americanas/Submarino are lousy in customer service sometimes.

Estante Virtual is really great - the moment I found out about them I stopped going downtown to hunt for books (the good thing is that they're just "forcing" owners to index their collections, and they get to be the middle man).

How do other brands compare? For example, how much would a similar Dell or Lenovo laptop cost?

You pretty much can't buy Lenovo in Brazil (I mean the Thinkpads).

Dell is established, affordable, good customer service. Competes here with Acer, HP, Toshiba and even cheaper brands probably assembled in Brazil (like Positivo). Sony Vaios are normally a little bit higher priced, closer to Apple.

The lower end Dells start around R$ 1700 (820 USD): Core i5, 4GB Ram and 1 TB HD. The higher end (gaming or slim) ones, my guess would probably be around R$ 3500 (1700 USD).

A friend of mine who has family in Brazil would buy electronics like game consoles in the US and take them down on the plane, because it was significantly cheaper that way.