I've got a mid-high end HP notebook, which I've run with some permutation of XP, Vista and Ubuntu for the last year. Its treated me fairly well as far as being rugged, with a nice big monitor. It is a bit heavy....
What sorts of stuff are you running? My experience with high-end notebooks these days is that they can run basically anything -- fairly high end games, as many desktop apps as you can download, even Matlab runs pretty well on my laptop. So long as you aren't hosting a serious website or doing some crazy data analytics AI stuff, I think you're fine.
Granted, I haven't owned one, but I do more than browse the internet. Netbooks typically can't provide enough horsepower to run all of the programs I like to run at the same time.