I just recently played through this exercise. I was at SQL Saturday Atlanta and my laptop decided to start acting finicky. I have fixed that problem on that laptop but it hastened the pace to getting a new laptop.

I settled on the Dell M3800 because it is lightweight. I could put plenty of storage in it and it is configurable up to 16GB memory. So far the responsiveness of the laptop is very satisfying.

I had been thinking I would go with the Surface Pro at 8GB, but it was perpetually out of stock and it cost about the same as the Dell laptop or even the Yogi from Lenovo.

The only reason (at this point) for me to get a Surface is as a lightweight backup presentation device.