MacBook Pro better value than Dell or HP

I have been given the task to get a couple of the highest powered laptops I can for some researchers I work with. Fortunately I can get education pricing from all the major manufacturers and my University has negotiated special pricing on top of that. I approached each of the companies that we deal with and asked for 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo laptops with 2Gig of RAM and 17" screen. The following is a list of the laptops and prices that I received. The Toshiba dealer I approached said that Toshiba Australia don't sell Core 2 Duo laptops at this stage.

Surprisingly Apple comes out as the best value. There are some differences between the systems that may or may not worry you, such as hard drive speed, size, graphics speed (if you are a gamer), screen resolution etc.

	$4,585	$4,068	$4,912	$3,871
Company	Dell	HP	HP	Apple
Model	M1710	nx9420	nw9440	17"2.33
CPU	T7600	T7600	T7600	T7600
CPU Speed	2.33GHz	2.33GHz	2.33GHz	2.33GHz
RAM	2G	2G	2G	2G
HDD	120G (5400)	100G (7200)	100G (7200)	160G (5400)
DVD Write	DL	DL	DL	DL
Display Size	17" wide	17" wide	17" wide	17" wide
Display Res	1920x1200	1440x900	1920x1200	1680x1050
Weight (kg)	4	3.36	3.4	3.1
Battery	80Whr	68Whr	68Whr	68Whr
Grf Make	NVidia	ATI	NVidia	ATI
Grf Model	7900GS	X1600	FX 1500M	X1600
Grf RAM	256M	256M	512M	256M

What does worry me is the lack of Home/End/PgUp/PgDn keys. I do a lot of code editing and frequently use these keys. Before investing in the system I am going to have to be sure that I can comfortably and quickly navigate around a document. I should also mention that the 7200rpm hard drives are very interesting - and I would like to benchmark the difference with some of our statistical analysis software. Dell and Apple mentioned that they could install the 7200rpm drives. Do 7200rpm drives have heat or reliability issues?

Just confirming that all prices are in Australian dollars and have the educational discounts offered by the respective companies (usually available to institutions, staff and students).