When I worked for Canonical, they made it a point not to have a reference corporate laptop precisely for that - we all ran different brands with different configurations (one of my colleagues had a late MIPS sub-laptop as his travel companion). The Japanese laptops were by far the most interesting and unique.

I picked an unimaginative Dell (my house was burglarized right before I started and I lost my then daily driver) because it had the shortest delivery time.