Personally, I use a Surface Pro 2 when I want to program on the go. However, if you go that route, I wouldn't suggest the Type Cover. I use a bluetooth keyboard that works well with it. Plus a mini bluetooth mouse if I ever find the need to use it. It might not be the fastest machine, but it works for indie projects. Plus the touch screen/pen combo is great if you make your own art resources. So far, my Surface Pro 2 can play most modern games at medium to high settings so developing on it shouldn't really be a problem. It's worked for me thus far.

The "commercial heavy-on-graphics games" guys are using workstations with 16-32 GB of memory, top of the line Intel i7s (which are faster than anything laptops have, and sometimes in dual CPU configurations), top of the line GPUs (again, way faster than mobile chips and frequently in SLI/Crossfire), SSDs and/or RAID arrays, and software that makes all of that necessary. One friend told me his new work machine was dual Xeons, 64 GB of memory, and 2x GTX Titans. Be realistic.

Yeah, those companies are serious. They even have power generators. In a company I was at, in one room aircodintion was falling out regulary when pc got turned on :) -and it was not even the digital art production, just a coder guy,

We all had extreme multicore cpus becouse of shared source compilation farming (yes, all our computers were permanently compiling a colegue f5 issue, one would have to wait 15 minutes else how, so it got reduced to 1.5 minute)

But notebooks are what I like to develop at. It is a machine you can profile low end users setups without payin thousands for old working desktops.

my laptop should not hold me back from developing commercial heavy-on-graphics games.

Point is, your laptop isn't what will hold you back there, but not having a 300 people team. You just don't do "commercial heavy-on-graphics games" without a ton of artists and a dozen of gfx coders (on both shader and low level GPU coding ends)

The "commercial heavy-on-graphics games" guys are using workstations with 16-32 GB of memory, top of the line Intel i7s (which are faster than anything laptops have, and sometimes in dual CPU configurations), top of the line GPUs (again, way faster than mobile chips and frequently in SLI/Crossfire), SSDs and/or RAID arrays, and software that makes all of that necessary. One friend told me his new work machine was dual Xeons, 64 GB of memory, and 2x GTX Titans. Be realistic.

Thanks, both are perfectly true. Basically at 1k , I won't get a laptop that will let me do everything i can want for the next 10 years :P If i want more, i'd obviously have to switch to a full fledged workstation. Well, based on the comments, at 1k, I've found a laptop with these features:

1. 8 GB RAM

2. Quad core , higher end i7 4702MQ

3. 2GB Nvidia Graphics memory

4. 15.6" , 1920 x 1080 display

5. 1TB HDD + 8 GB SSD (going full SSD doesn't fit the 1k budget. This 8 GB SSD is just a bonus, wasn't actually looking for it; but now it's good to have it)

It weighs 2.6 kg though :( But I guess, I'll have to live with that.

Haha, I was trying hard to avoid getting an early hunchback :)