I have quite a few laptops right now and I use all of them:
1) Dell XPS 15 9560 (my primary driver)
2) Lenovo Y510p (my workhorse that I've had for
years)
3) MacBook Pro 13 Retina 2014 (simply amazing; my wife's primary driver)
4) Surface Pro 2017 i5 8gb (use it for projects, wife uses it a lot, is switching to this as her primary machine)
The Surface isn't really a laptop though, it's a tablet with a keyboard attachment; however, it is VERY powerful, more powerful even than many ultrabooks and far more powerful than every ARM, Atom, or i3-based ultrabook/notebook.
I've been using the Surface quite a bit for some RF embedded programming and research that I've been doing recently. My wife uses it mostly for art, graphics design, digital painting, and sketching... When using the Microsoft pen (don't use others, like the Bamboo Ink), you get the tilt functionality so you can do shading and gradients without relying on pressure sensitivity..
So if you draw, do graphics design, or web design sketches -- or you do reviews of other people's work (which is what I use it for, to draw on webpage snapshots for developer feedback) then it's great.
But using it as a primary laptop, given it's price ... meh ... I couldn't recommend that.
My Y510p is 5 years old, is using a Haswell 2.8ghz->3.4ghz i7, and it runs circles around a brand new Surface Pro i5. It's not remotely comparable -- and you could probably get a y510p for dirt cheap; especially used... They are inexpensive, yet extremely powerful laptops. They have problems though, like the offset trackpad which sucks -- but they're very large, gaming laptops that are effectively desktop replacements.
The MacBook Pro 13 is just a joy to use... It's lightweight, lacks any bulk, it weighs just a bit more than the Surface Pro and that's with a protective case attached to it, and it's just built to last. My MacBook is 4 years old, a Haswell i7, 16gb RAM; and it's just a perfect computer. I develop all the time on this machine; often preferring it for it's OS X interface which is just a joy to work with, it's well-integrated environment, it's MUCH better battery life than any of my other devices (including the Surface)...
The MacBook Pro is easily the best laptop I own, and I am not an Apple fanboy (I don't use an iPhone if you're wondering, although my wife has the X, I use the Note).
You can get a used 2014 MacBook Pro online for around $500; I know because I just bought another one as a gift. These laptops are ideal for most users; and if you're not techie, OS X is a much better operating system than Windows.... there's just, no comparison.. OS X > Windows for just about everything except gaming and well, Windows-centric software development.
Then there's the XPS 15....
The XPS 15 is a great laptop that's basically an answer to the MacBook Pro but one-ups it hardware-wise and feature-wise. The XPS is considered by many as the best laptop there is, bar none. I personally love the XPS's feature set; however .. it has a host of problems that for me, place it below the MacBook Pro...
For one, the cost.. it's just as expensive as a decked out MacBook Pro.. Now, it's a BETTER piece of equipment as far as the individual components go. It has a better screen, better PCIe SSD, etc .. however, those components do not necessarily work better, in real life use, compared to a Mac.
For example, the 4k screen on my laptop (XPS 15) is the best screen there is on any laptop AFAIK -- but it sucks!!
Why? Because Windows 10 still cannot fucking render applications and fonts correctly at 4k!!!! Microsoft STILL has not upgraded it's font and bitmap rendered to support what 4k TVs have supported (decent upscaling) for the past
5-6 years.
Having a fast PCIe SSD is great, but, Windows 10 is a space whore... So if you're operating on a 256gb PCIe SSD, well, Windows 10 will want 64GB+ to itself over time .. My Windows installation today is massive .. and I don't mean just /Windows, nono; I mean /Windows, /ProgramData (bullshit), as well as hiberfil.sys and pagefile.sys... So if you have 16GB of RAM, well, Windows will want 32GB of disk space for paging and hibernation
(it should be able to do this with half the space, the same way Linux and OS X does, but nah.... We're still in the 90s using Windows XP hibernation) .. But all in all my Windows install is 100GB.
Knowing that going in, I had to opt for a 512GB SSD, but you wouldn't need that for a MacOS X machine because the way the operating system works; applications are sandboxed, don't generally have files outside of their own /Applications folder, and even then, usually live within their own Application container (a special kind of directory) ... This is what allows you to drag an app into the trash and every trace of it is gone, rather than having random DLLs and files just cluttering your system.
MacOS X sandboxing is just not a thing on Windows....
The keyboard ... well, I'm not a huge fan of the MacBook Pro grid keyboard; never have been.. The best keyboard I have on a laptop is the y510p, and it has it's problems .. but the XPS keyboard just has such short key travel that it's really not enjoyable to type on for long periods of time.
The trackpad, well, it's great but again, it's still not as good as the MacBook's... People say they've "finally gotten it" but that's marketing b.s., or people who want to finally say that they have .. but they haven't.. For some reason, Apple's trackpads -- once you use them -- are just better, period. There's no denying it.
... Anyway, that's my overall review of these 4 devices ... If I had to score them all 1-10, it'd be something along the lines of:
XPS 15 9560 (i7): (8.5 / 10)
MacBook Pro (i7): (10 / 10)
y510p (2013, i7): (8 / 10)
Surface Pro (2017, i5): (9 / 10)
If you're interested in playing games though, and by games I mean the latest and greatest, and that's going to be a daily thing for you, then the XPS would probably be the best laptop you can get ... It's great for gaming, even connected to a large monitor.
But if you mostly just play games that are not graphically intensive, then you could use a MacBook ... Also, you can attach an external GPU to a MacBook as well, so if you're going to dock your laptop before you game, you could setup a dock with a Thunderbolt-attached eGPU and use that to drive your games... But it's a rather technical solution that I wouldn't necessarily recommend.