My personal experience with Acer (and Gateway) laptops is not encouraging. They look OK on paper but usually have cheap components on the inside and are very-very slow. Since I would most likely need mobile computing due to recent developments at work, I am contemplating some modest investment into a laptop because the nice university notebook I have will be left behind.
Asus U30Jc (A1 and other models in this series) looks quite nice. For the price of $900, it has somewhat bigger screen than Alienware (13' vs 11'), has DVD drive, similar NVidia card, it doing at least as good or slightly better on most of the tests, and has very decent battery with 8 hours of regular use. And it is not much heavier (less than a pound heavier) and has world wide warranty. Not that stylish though but I really don't care.