I wound up getting an Apple MacBook Pro Retina 13-inch, 2.6GHz Core i5, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD. Half a dozen of my colleagues had chosen the 13″ rMBP with various sizes of SSD, and it feels like the perfect compromise between power and weight. Normally I’d have bought an extra power supply, but since I have several perfectly serviceable spares, I saved a little money by picking up a MagSafe to MagSafe 2 Converter.
My first tasks when I got home were to upgrade to OS X 10.8.3 (it shipped with 10.8.2) and install Microsoft Office. In the past, this was an expensive and niggling procedure, picking just the right version to get the features I wanted. But Office 365 has made all that a thing of the past. $99 a year lets me install pretty much everything I need on up to five of my machines – Windows or Mac. I added Microsoft Lync and a Citrix Web Client, turned on FileVault, and I’m good to go.