My only experience with a Dell laptop was pretty bad. I will give Dell this: they had fantastic customer suervice. I'd send my laptop out on monday, I'd have it back wednesday morning 'fixed'.
With that said: over the corse of the two years I owned it (I had a 2 year complete care on it) it blew:
5 ram modules, one DVD drive, and 4 motherboards. The last mother board was about a month after my warranty was out. They wanted 1500 to fix it. I bought a Lenovo, and *knock on wood* have not had a problem yet, that was not software related. (Windows decided to crap itself after the last update it performed.. good thing I use windows about 5% of the time).
Of course this is probably an isolated incident, but because of it I'll never own another Dell. I also only purchase laptops, as desktops are just too easy to build.