i'll check back in a month or two and let you all know if it's a total disaster or not ;-)
a.
laptop spec's vs price
If your set on a pc, Id go for a gaming laptop. They'd have the horsepower to keep things running smooth. I run ableton on a 1.42 ghz ibook g4 just fine, so I think if your looking at a dual-core pc youll be in the clear. The only reason pc's are iffy is because of windows (shudders), the osx86 project is running pretty smoothly so pretty soon you can get OSX running fast enough on a pc for it to be quite usable for media.