I use a 13" macbook air with 4gb of ram. When I'm at home, I hook it up to a Dell 30" lcd with an old school MS Natural Keyboard and an Evoluent Vertical Mouse.
Thinkpad T410s running Arch and Gnome 3. Switched over from a 3-monitor desktop setup a couple of months back and haven't really looked back. I'm finding it easier to enter "flow" on a 14" screen than with 4000 square pixels of peripheral noise, and it's nice not feeling chained down to one particular location.
If you're not an OSX fanatic, most of the Thinkpads are great machines to hack on.
13" MackBook Pro (2011 Core i7) with 4 GB RAM using an external Acer 24" lcd and a fancy logitech mouse.
Please find another brand for the external monitor, Acer does not have drivers for mac :s
- 15" MacBook Pro (2010 Core i5) with 8GB RAM. Swapped out the stock HD for a 120GB SSD and used OWC DataDoubler to put in a 1 TB 7200 RPM hard drive for media/scratch.