So what's the point of this, for Dell's bottom line? Even with the relatively steep price, a developer-focused laptop is not going to be a best-seller. And in a few years, how many of those driver developers are going to be fully-focused on updating software for a niche laptop?
As much as I wish it were the case, what developers adopt is not always what will be profitable to the masses. And this ends up biting developers in the end. My Macbook Air is good enough that I don't think I need to go back to Linux...and I can be relatively confident that even if Apple continues to screw with the OS, the Apple OS X user base is so massive that niceties like homebrew will be supported as long, if not longer, than the niceties for a developer-focused laptop.