X300 out today

As an update to my previous post on the X300, it was officially released by Lenovo today. See the great post describing some of its unique features over at Inside the Box. Two things that were unmentioned (as far as I know) before launch: 1) it does have a type of roll cage (the “Hybrid Roll Cage II” design) like its larger siblings, and 2) the keyboard has LED indicators for buttons like caps lock and mute (not earth shattering, but a nice touch).
As a Mac user who also has a ThinkPad, one of the things that still gets me when I think about purchasing a X300 (or something like the Toshiba R500) is that, even with all of this fantastic hardware design (competitive, one could claim, with Apple), you still have to run Windows. There’s a disconnect for me in there somewhere. You spend all this time designing a great looking laptop (as mentioned in my previous post) and can’t put a beautiful OS on it. I’m sure the Lenovo designers would love to see Apple license the Mac OS — ain’t gonna happen, of course — but they’re stuck with Vista, or worse, XP. (And Linux is a non-starter in this discussion.) The intuitiveness of the interior design should match that of the exterior. Lenovo is probably the best at using the ThinkVantage system to negotiate between the user and the counter-intuitive design (to me, at least) of many Vista dialogs, but it sadly doesn’t make up for not being able to run Mac OSX on their machines.