Don't really have any specific models in mind right now, but those are some things to look for when you are shopping for one:
The big thing you have to worry about with Maya is getting laptop with a good discrete video chip that can handle OpenGL without any problems. Most of the Mobility Radeon or a GeForce Go chip should be fine so long as you've got a decent amonut of memory (at least around 32MB). Under no circumstances should you ever get anything with S3 onboard video. I tried the Maya 4 PLE on a store computer once to see how well it rendered and Maya crashed a LOT because it had issues with how the S3 video handled OpenGL. The onboard Intel graphics some of the cheap Centrino notebooks use will probably work okay (The Maya class I took had it running on 1GHz P3s with onboard graphics), so long as the models didn't get too heavy and complicated.
The newest laptop graphics chips like the Redeon 9600 don't really seem to make a huge difference in Maya as far as modeling and animating scenes goes, since you aren't using any advanced shaders or a lot of memory hogging textures. You might bog down with a big scene on the older graphics chips, especially if you enable antialiased wireframes. Some of the newer chips that have programmable shaders will allow you to use the hardware renderer, which speeds up rendering a lot if you are willing to give up some of the nicer features of the software or mentalRay renderers.
I've run Maya at home on both a GF2MX and a GF4Ti4200, and honestly I haven't seen a huge difference jumping up to the faster card. The big benefits come with the Quadro and FireGL chips, which have special features that aren't present in the gaming chips to speed up 3D modeling work (like antialiasing wireframes in hardware, for example). I've seen some laptops with Quadro Go chips, but they are preofessional-level desktop replacements that start around $2000.
As far as processors go, just about anything out on the market will run it fine. If you are going to be rendering on the laptop, get the fastest chip you can afford so you can save yourself some time waiting. (A few seconds here and there really add up when you're animating at 30 frames per second). I'd also get the biggest screen your budget will allow, something that will do at least 1280x1024, so you have plenty of room to work. It's always nice to have a big hard drive, but before you spend a lot on a big internal laptop drive, look into getting an external USB drive for storing your completed animation. They are cheap now (you can get an Western Digital 80GB for under a hundred bucks after rebates if you catch it when OfficeMax and Best Buy run them on sale) and they have a lot faster spindle speed than laptop drives, which makes editing the video of your animation a lot easier if you have to do it. It's also nice to have an external for backing up your projects anyway, since it would be a huge bummer to have your laptop stolen and lose hundreds of hours of work that can't really be replaced.
Firewire is also a nice feature to look for as well, since it lets you hook up a miniDV camcorder to your laptop and import footage to be used for animation reference (like the guys at Pixar taping themselves walking around the studio with boards strapped to their feet so they could use the footage as reference for how the army men in Toy Story moved when they animated them). The camcorder connection is also nice if you ever want to get footage out of your computer and on to tape. This came in handy for me once when I had a student video project of mine Adobe wanted to put on one of their demo reels, and they needed it in MiniDV format (VHS just wouldn't do quality wise). I hooked up my camcorder via Firewire and used Premiere to fire it out of my PC and on to DV tape and then sent it to them. Worked like a charm, looked really nice, and was a heck of a lot cheaper than getting a DV format recording deck.
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