Fastfwd75

I did exactly what you did except that my MBP 2012 with C2D also had an SSD. The MBA is still faster and so incredibly lighter that the ipad becomes useless.

Do not get an SSD for the MBP. Sell it and get the MBA. Or wait and get the next MBP depending on specs.

I have typed a lot with dell keyboards both desktop and laptop models. I have come to ever prefer the macbook keyboard but it took a while. I think that any keyboard takes getting used to.
That being said the keyboard on my other HP laptop is the thing from hell; I could never get used to that monstrosity.

Maybe I am just at this point in my life but it already seems like CPU speed is not that important vs the usability of the software. Once you have something quick enough to display what you work on in real time the rest is just useless.
Sure CPU speed is still important for video processing or compiling huge porgrams but for most people this is not a concern. Most of what I do would work just fine on a mobile processor with a big screen and keyboard.
I look forward to advances in connectivity and interfaces. More voice commands, screen within normal glasses and everything connected to everything so you can walk and see where are the busses on the lines intersecting you and maybe pre-order a coffee while you walk so you can just pick it up and then grab the bus in time.

I have no idea what graphics card are compared to other but I know my current MBA only has integrated graphics and that’s a big limiter with games. Maybe the older airs had discrete cards like the macbook pros???

I mean “NVIDIA® GeForce® 8600M GT or ATI Radeon™ HD 2600 or better” is chinese to me. How do you compare that to Intel 3000?

My wife and I have stickers on our macbooks bought from etsy so we don’t mix them up if they both happen to be closed on the same table. Mostly for the fun of it since it would just take 1 second to open it and look at the login screen to make sure the one we pick up is ours.

Never ran out of battery with the 3gs or 4s yet. I plug it in every night.

I have plugged it in during the evening once because the battery seemed low and I was playing a LOT of a new game I got. I should let it drain completely once just to calibrate it.

You mention you really want the 2GB card. Pretty sure the refreshed card will be much more performant for the same price. Refresh is way too close to risk it.

I think the macbook pros will get updated alone long before a refresh of the macbook airs. If you need it now; get it.

Depends on how much you like phones. My philosophy is to pay for things to the measure of how much I use them. So technically I should be OK paying more for my phone than I do for my car.
I have a 4S and will sell it and get a 5 when it comes out unless there is really nothing worth upgrading.
I also switch laptops yearly and resell to a pretty good price the “old” ones. I am looking forward to the new macbook pros.

I went the other way and am using my harmony remote to replace a bunch of remotes including the apple one but that is a really cool idea for situation where a very small and simple remote does the job.

An ecosystem is everything that 3rd party people do for your platform without you needing to involve your own resources. And yes it is 100% necessary on a smartphone.
Sure a lot of people still use mobile as phones or just for email but that is changing and quite rapidly.
Very soon the idea of a non-smartphone will be as ludicrous as the idea of a phone without SMS or a camera.

Your own products are not the ecosystem. The ecosystem is everything else. The challenge for any mobile maker is never to get the best hardware or software. The challenge is to get the 3rd party developers interested so they work for you without you paying them.
As far as I know most apps are still developped on iOS first. Android has become such a close second that they are probably equal by now. RIM and Windows are still far far behind and quite frankly what is the motivation for a developer to make the effort to port their apps to Windows?
Linux failed for home use. OSX succeeded because it had advantages and also permitted people to run their windows software in dual boot or VM configuration.
Maybe the only path for Windows is to run an Android VM until they get enough developers porting code to native Windows mobile.