I use Acer w700 for all my development but I've got my eye on the new Lenovo Thinkpad Helix. 256 GB SSD, 8 GB ram, core i7 CPU, detachable screen where you can turn it to the other side as well for presentation. Looks really cool. It's expensive though.

Depending on your version, the solutions in Lotus Notes change considerably. For version 6.5 databases, I think they do share the message info but return receipt is an action decided by the client, so it is probably not shared among different clients like Outlook and Lotus Notes. If you want a return receipt option on 6.5, I found open NTF templates to be very useful. I'm not sure if there is already an option for it but you can probably code some Lotus script to achieve what you want.

Wow, my first impression is that W3C is trying to block Silverlight and XAML taking over the web and I think that's great. I would like to see 3D API for canvas but I guess 3D libraries can be built on top of the 2D API. I do agree that it's a little conflicting with Xforms and XHTML 2 but I guess they figure it's going to be easier for browsers to support HTML 5 in the short run. I love the new tags and attributes: command, details, datalist, event-source, output, progress, new input types, autofocus, ping, menu, back button API for AJAX... wow man.. if it holds, it's going to make things a lot easier and standardized for developers...