Battery life, surprisingly isn't that far off. In real world use the Macbook Pro 15" gets just under 3 hours. The HP is getting just over 2 hours, there is about a 45 Minute difference. But for the $1300, go buy a second battery for the HP and be happy.
Weight wise the HP is actually 0.1# lighter than the Macboo Pro. Though we couldn't tell the difference.
I will give it to you that the Macbook has a slightly higher resolution@ 1440x900 vs. the HPs 1366x768. But again, we are talking a $1300 price difference. I just don't see that being reasonable.
We had both laptops sitting side by side, and we just couldn't figure out why the Macbook Pro was $1300 more. Yes it had a gimmicky all aluminum case, but the HP had metal(not sure what type) on the LCD lid and palm rest, only the bottom was plastic, which IMO is more than sturdy enough.
And the memory issue on the Iphone4 is far from boring, if hardware is your concern. You are just dismissing it because it is a huge flaw. When I could get a 32GB DroidX for the price of the 16GB Iphone4, that is a huge thing. Other than that, there isn't much else between the two hardware wise. The DroidX has a bigger screen, but the Ipone4's display is higher resolution. The DroidX also has an FM Tuner, and Flash support. All this isn't me saying the Iphone4 is bad though, it is a great phone.
I'm not saying this to bash them, I'm just saying it. If they don't like, then they can lower their prices to be more inline with what they sell and not overprice their products. The products are actually good, just overpriced. But this using propriatary screws to prevent users from accessing hardware they own is total BS.