I went from using a MacBook to a MacBook Pro, which seems to go against the trend. After having used the MBP a bit, I can now confirm the importance of a few of the differentiators:
The LED backlighting really makes the display. I also love going back from the glossy “let’s pump up the saturation and call it ‘better’” school of displays of which my MacBook’s facilities are a part, but there’s a noticeable difference when comparing to other “matte” displays.
I love multi-touch gestures. I’m using the trunk build of Adium, which has swipe bound to tab switching (and enumerating the Log Viewer list) and it’s just as wonderful as in the other apps.
The larger display doesn’t do really much for me on its own, but being able to have such a resolution at roughly that pixel pitch does - I just went up in screen real-estate for the first time since I added a second display to my PC desktop system over five years ago. (Since then it’s been a downgrade to the PowerBook and a downgrade to the MacBook (by a few pixel rows). And I count simultaneous real-estate, so Spaces doesn’t count, no.) This real-estate comes in real handy when using, say, Coda.
Keyboard backlighting is as neat (and, some will note, dubiously useful) as ever.
DVI output with a bundled DVI-VGA adapter is valuable, since it brings down the number of “nickel-and-dimingly expensive adapters you’ll need to buy” dramatically.
It’s also hard to eliminate the sheer joy of being able to return to a GPU that isn’t, for all intents and purposes, made out of cardboard with the words “internal RAM” crossed out and “siphoned RAM” written in in crayon. There’s a huge difference, and I’m never going back to an “integrated graphics controller” again until they start bundling their own RAM and stop sucking in general. (Which I guess would defeat the point.)
I remain reasonably convinced that the PowerBook G4 I purchased a few years ago had the worst bang/buck ratio of any computer I’ve ever bought and that the MacBook had the best. So why return? Simply because while the MacBook Pro can’t match the MacBook for sheer value, it’s now got enough differentiators for my mind that it’s at a decent “luxury tax” price point.
Even though it sucks that the MacBook hasn’t got a real GPU on its own, for example, it doesn’t diminish the MacBook Pro’s inherent value. Even though I could have waited a few months and gotten in on the ground floor on the upcoming generation of Core 2s (”Centrino 2″), I didn’t, since it’s still a good value now. Even though it hasn’t escaped me that it looks kinda sorta like the lost brother of my PowerBook G4 and that it’s “due for a revision”, it’s been “due for a revision” for a long time now, and I’m not getting that tired of the look or form factor, although there are obviously people who are.
But me? I’m more than satisfied.