It really has to do with your usages. I wanted a laptop that could play games, light/portable, and had a really strong battery life. I was looking at an Asus notebook at the time, but the Macbook Pro was $700 cheaper due to lack of raid-0 ssd's even though it had the same CPU, GPU, and similar build quality.
You could get a relatively cheap laptop with a quad i7 haswell and a 7970m/8970m that could kick serious ass. It would have lackluster build quality and poor battery life though.
GPUs are wicked fast in notebooks now and can clock pretty high. The 650m in my notebook easily reaches the desktop GTX 650 in clockspeeds and perfomance.
Notebookcheck often reviews gaming notebooks of all shapes and sizes. They just reviewed an Asus gaming notebook that crushes all the benchmarks, and achieves over 6 hours of battery life on the wifi test.
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Asus-G750JZ-T4023H-Notebook.116196.0.html
Notebookcheck also does regular 'Best' updates where they list some notebooks:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Notebookcheck-s-Top-10-Multimedia-Notebooks.98608.0.html
While the pricing is not accurate on the website, they have quite informative reviews; even if the native german reviews are not properly translated all the time.
Boutique laptop builders are probably your best bet for a good deal. The 7970m/8970m/m290x has the best value by far, but the 780m/880m has better power savings. Definitely go for a haswell i7 in the notebook. AMD cpu's are not competetive in notebooks.