On the other hand, all of those features tend to result in machines that stretch the definition of laptop and usually land themselves into what used to be called "luggables". Even Apple's 17" MacBook Pro was 6.6 pounds and 15.5 inches wide, and if you triple the TDP of the GPU, double the number of memory slots, and increase the battery and cooling proportionately you've got something that can only be transported with special purpose luggage.

I disagree. I think the high-end Macbook Pro is one of the best gaming laptops out there. The Nvidia chip is almost half as powerful as the AMD 6850 I used to have in my desktop, which has a giant turbine fan and takes up two PCI slots! Sure, performance in OSX is often poor, but BootCamp and often Parallels solve this problem quite elegantly. It's not too different from booting up a console, I think. Thanks to my Mac, I can travel the world and also play Metro Last Light whenever I feel like. :)

(Caveat: it's almost been a year so it's starting to show its age in some new games. But that's not really something you can get away from. I'm also concerned that the next gen Macbook will only offer an integrated Iris Pro chip instead of Nvidia switching. Don't get me wrong - Iris Pro graphics are impressive, often performing at up to 66% of the Nvidia chip - but it will almost certainly be a performance regression.)

>There's no Macbook that's good for gaming, because of the OS and the cooling.

I'm not sure what you mean here regarding the OS. You can install Windows on any Mac since Apple transitioned to Intel processors around 2006-2007.

There's always Boot Camp. For me, at least, this has gotten a lot more pleasant with Yosemite - rebooting into Windows is incredibly fast now!

I've been playing modern AAA games on Medium graphics settings at 1080p (or sometimes 720p) with very good results on an original Retina MacBook Pro. Could I get better graphics with a different machine? Totally, but it's good enough that I don't feel like I have to own a separate gaming machine anymore, which I'm very happy about.