I ordered one of these which came out to $1462.00 before tax.

- 16GB of ram

- 180GB Intel mstata SSD

- 1TB spinning disk

- Upgraded the wireless card

It's as portable of a machine as I can get that will still replace a desktop.

What's the battery life like for these?

They are estimating around 4 hours. I tend to move my laptop around a bunch, but it's just generally from room to room and table to table. So, for my use case, this machine is perfect. If you're a road warrior though... it's realllly hard to beat the 12 hours on the new MBAs.

Galaga ultrapro fits all of my needs but I am a little skeptical to jump into the bandwagon before seeing any reviews of the device.

I have a tricked out Gazelle (256gb ssd, 750hd instead of dvd, 8gb ram, quadcore etc etc) and it's been a delight. I love it

I hear the battery life is poor because of the high specs.

According to mythlogic, battery life is upto 5 hours. https://www.mythlogic.com/configure.php?id=146 That's poor compared to what other haswell laptops offer.

The MSI GE40 has up to 8 hours with a quad-core Haswell processor. It seems like a good balance of computing power and battery life.