For those who don't know much about non-Apple PCs:
The only laptops worth considering are the enterprise lines from dell hp, and lenovo. They are night and day differences from the consumer products, because they are usually entirely separate divisions. Within this, certain lines are better than others. For example, with lenovo I would only really consider a t-series, w-series, or x-series. The p-series looks promising, but that just came out, so maybe don't rush into that if you want to reduce risk.
If the laptop doesn't have the RAM or harddrive soldered on, it's probably cheaper to buy from newegg and install an upgrade yourself than it is to upgrade through the product configurator. This does not void the warranty. The support pages from the website have explicit instruction manuals for doing this yourself as well as full disassembly instructions.
The enterprise laptops have support pages with crapware free drivers. If you don't feel like surgically removing crapware from a new installation, just nuke it from space and install the OS fresh. Heck, most time you don't even need to install those drivers, because the base windows drivers are fine for most things (there's probably a performance bump to using the drivers, and some things, like the fingerprint reader, will need a driver), so you could just skip the driver install.
Since these are enterprise laptops, you can still get 7 and 8 preinstalled (thank god for corporate compliance policies, am i right?! ;). MS call it "downgrade rights". Much like Apple, the best MS OS is the one released in 2009 (windows 7), so splurge for the "downgrade" to it if it's offered for the laptop you want.
If you care inordinately about crapware and don't want to spend time nuking a fresh laptop, then buy a laptop (again only enterprise laptops from lenovo, hp, and dell) from microsoft directly, since those don't come with spyware: http://www.microsoftstore.com/store?SiteID=msusa&Locale=en_U...
You can also get warranties that last much longer than 2 years (some go up to 5), cover accidental damage, or cover the battery, but the specific policies offered depend on which company you go with. I have taken advantage of the lenovo accidental damage warranty a few times, and it was great. The default warranty requires you to ship the laptop off (lenovo overnights me a box with a prepaid overnight shipping label inside it so all I have to do is pack my laptop and drop it at the UPS store) and then they return it within a week, but you can also get an onsite repair warranty where someone will come to you to fix the laptop.
Trust me, it's worth dealing with a website that isn't as shiny as apple's website.