Turkey is really close to London. Domestic traffic in Australia travels further than that. It is quite a different matter round tripping packets across the pacific to another continent. I can do minor edits on a Linode but I much prefer using a local solution like vagrant. I would like to ditch OSX but the hardware/os combo is hard to beat.
For laptop, I recommend Macbook Air. The design, is a master piece of minimalism. As a guy who used Xmonad for years, I think OSX and a Linux VPS is the zen combo.