I'm not a Dell fan.
I would go with one of the following: The Apple (actually Asus-made) MacBook, Asus' latest-model of 14" widescreen gaming portable, the Lenovo X40, or the Lenovo T60.
The MacBook (non-Pro) is a decent value at $1100, or $1,000 for students. It's reasonably light, battery life is excellent, and the second version is both durable and very fast with a 1.83 or 2ghz C2D. Video performance sucks, but if you don't want to play games, it's a great laptop - even with the stock 5400RPM SATA hard drive, it's more than adequate for video and audio editing.
Asus makes excellent gaming laptops, too. They're durable, powerful, and generally expensive - but you get what you pay for. The A8J (or whatever its successor is) is an amazing machine with good video performance, a top-of-the-line CPU (technically, they're barebones laptops, so you pick the CPU yourself) and good battery life.
Lenovo just makes generally awesome laptops, with a high degree of quality and excellent support. The T60 is a powerful machine (though not reccomended for gaming), although not a cheap one. However, I prefer the original-model X40 with the 1ghz ULV processor (I own one) due to the battery life of 3.5 hours and the weight of 2.7 lbs.