The Lenovo Ideapad y550 is a very nice laptop...for $999 from Newegg you can get it with a core i7 quad core, 4gb RAM, 500GB HDD and a GeForce GT 240m.
It's a very capable laptop, i know someone that has it that runs multiple VMs on it and plays Fallout 3 on it on high settings.
Newegg.com - lenovo IdeaPad Y550P(324156U) NoteBook Intel Core i7 720QM(1.60GHz) 15.6" 4GB Memory DDR3 1066 500GB HDD 5400rpm DVD±R/RW NVIDIA GeForce GT 240M - Laptops / Notebooks