Is there any specialized software you need for your research? Are there any quirks of the research documents that you need to open?
I also like Macbooks, but they start at around $1k. Great keyboards and screens, and a reasonable size and weight if you carry it around a lot.
The Apple OS is particularly good at representing data and helping you to find it and organize it on your drive/network.
If you need to, Intel Macs can dual boot XP or Vista, or you can run them from within OS X with software like Parallels or VMWare. But you may never need to as there is free software like NeoOffice that will open most MS documents.
If you do go for Apple, I’d also recommend getting Applecare, one of the few extended warranties that are worth it.
