Agreed. The M3800 workstation is what I chose after a similarly frustrating search to the OP's over a year ago.
It's all subjective, but big pros for me was Win7 (as a business machine this was available over a year ago, at a time when most new laptops were Win8 only), really good Debian support (with VMware I rarely need to boot into Win7 now), 16GB RAM option, two drive bays (mSATA and SATA) so 2TB SSD is obtainable, very high resolution screen (3200x1800).
Cons - gloss screen occasionally frustrating, all that space and they relegated page-up/down and home/end into Fn-accessible keys, short battery life, 15" is perhaps too big (but 13" is untenable as a mobile computer), poor touch-screen support in Debian, hideously expensive when properly kitted out (16GB, after-market two x 1TB drives, best display, etc).
In any case, OP has some good points - with Lenovo breaking everyone's trust (and their keyboards going downhill) options for good GNU/Linux mobile workstations are drastically reduced, and it's a painful process to try to work out what hardware support is actually like before you actually have a new machine in front of you.
yes - I have a fully kitted out one (16GB, 512 ssd, quadro, hidpi etc) and it hit me for around 2000 pounds at the time. Same price as similar MBP. The only issue I've had is that I couldn't get CUDA running properly under any Linux flavour when I also had an external monitor plugged in. Completely frustrating so the quadro 1100 basically goes unused. Other than that, I like the machine a lot. It's superseded now but the new one looks even better. I don't honestly think I'll need to replace this for another couple of years so 4-5 years for this to me makes the initial outlay easy to justify.
It's all subjective, but big pros for me was Win7 (as a business machine this was available over a year ago, at a time when most new laptops were Win8 only), really good Debian support (with VMware I rarely need to boot into Win7 now), 16GB RAM option, two drive bays (mSATA and SATA) so 2TB SSD is obtainable, very high resolution screen (3200x1800).
Cons - gloss screen occasionally frustrating, all that space and they relegated page-up/down and home/end into Fn-accessible keys, short battery life, 15" is perhaps too big (but 13" is untenable as a mobile computer), poor touch-screen support in Debian, hideously expensive when properly kitted out (16GB, after-market two x 1TB drives, best display, etc).
In any case, OP has some good points - with Lenovo breaking everyone's trust (and their keyboards going downhill) options for good GNU/Linux mobile workstations are drastically reduced, and it's a painful process to try to work out what hardware support is actually like before you actually have a new machine in front of you.