Here's a comic for people on this thread:

http://xkcd.com/1172/

Lenovo, or any other manufacturer, will not keep producing gadgets for your exact same specification for the rest of your professional life. Actually, what they come up with in the first place was not designed by your specs, you got used to the gadget in time. Now it seems it's time to start using another one, getting familiar with it, and having some uncomfortable one or two weeks.

I don't feel it really applies here. Thinkpad are (were ?) tanks. Robustness people were willing to pay a premium. Now it feels like they just want the premium without the "too" expensive counterpart.

There's still DELL. I was a long-ish time ThinkPad fan and when I switched to DELL I liked it even more. Serviceability was the same, keyboard was surprisingly better, trackpoint with buttons was there as well. It's over a three years old model though, don't know where they moved since.

I honestly though Dell sold only cheap crap to gullible consumers. "Dude, you're getting a Dell!"

Is there some specific "line" of computers that Dell makes that are for serious users?

They have a "business" lines of products for notebooks, desktops, servers, .. they even have top of the line monitors. In the case of laptops, look for "Latitude" which is basically equivalent to Lenovo's ThinkPad.

I have E6400 and it has all the nice perks - metal-ish body so it's not squeeky and wiggly like a plastic notebook, one screw to remove bottom (to clean up fan, change ram, ...), one screw to change hard drive, "multi/ultra"bay slot so you can swap the useless optical drive for battery or hard drive, only few screws to change keyboard (so you can get an underlit one), docking station, international next business day care (with accidental damage) ... They just don't look so good as ThinkPad did/does. But that's a matter of opinion of course.

I haven't seen any of their books recently but if I were to buy something new I would definitely look into them.

Dell's painted plastic finish was also a big turnoff to me. The paint comes off and scratches much easier than the Lenovo black plastic and rubberized case.