I would have to request a battery test also. I am quite curious about the battery life with a 7200 rpm HDD vs a standard 5400 one. How much of a hit does it take? I am actually considering Purchasing this exact config. (minus the 4 gigs of ram) this june.

very nice, this was exactly what i was looking for, i'll be ordering my macbook pro 2.5 ghz (i find the 0,1 ghz to be neglegible when comparing price & performance), 200 gb 7200 rpm and 4 gigs of RAM (of course 3rd party RAM cause apple is overpricing like crazy for RAM) next week.

i'm wondering how the standard 2.5 ghz and the BTO compare when running virtualisation software like parallels and vmware fusion.

I second that.
After all, for a notebook battery life is still an important factor, isn't it?

RPM is the great myth of drives, so it's too bad RPM is how everybody compares drive performance. Not only can slower RPM drives sometimes outperform faster RPM drives when newer, more information-dense and efficient technologies are used in the "slower" drive, but battery life is also not linear to RPM. A number of studies around the Web show that battery life is not necessarily sacrificed, and may be balanced by faster boot times and other increases in overall efficiency that a faster drive affords. It's kind of like when Bluetooth 2 came out. Sure, it used more power, but the faster speed decreased transfer time so much that you ended up using less net power.

Of course, this always depends on which specific models of drives Apple puts in, but they never tell us.

Here's one test that concludes Choose the faster drive hard whenever possible.

I'm ordering the 7200 drive for my next MacBook Pro.

this is the setup i want but with the 17 inch screen just for the extra real estate. but just can't wait and thanks for the comments on the cheaper memory ill be bookmarking that. this is beats any windows laptop for the price