I'm a user of a Dell Inspiron 15 and have found it to be a pleasure to use for the past three years. It has to be said that it's coming to the end of its life now, as it's beginning to overheat and I've had to replace the battery and adapter twice now. But until these recent developments I have no complaints. It has everything you need (I find the multiple USB ports particularly useful when handling multiple devices). Everything is easily accessible, it looks good (very smooth and streamlined) and with a reasonable battery life.
The only thing I could generally complain about it is it's weight. I don't find it easy to use on a mobile day to day basis because moving it from place to place is quite the effort. If you want something extremely portable then I'd go for something much lighter like a small Acer, especially without a DVD rewriter since this can reduce the weight by a kg or so.