An excellent write up. In 2013 I was afraid they were going to get rid of the 101, so I bought it. Still using it today, and I just purchased a hard drive upgrade to put in it. It will probably be my last MacBook for many years to come. Upgradability, is the most important feature in my book. I still have A 2009 model running Snow Leopard, and it works great. I see no reason to go to a retina machine
My wife is using a 2009 15" MBP with SSD and original spinning HD moved to the opti-bay, and maxed out RAM -- same upgrades for me except I have the late 2012 MBP 15".
The trackpad is one of the main reasons I love the mac book pro's -- the PC laptops all have such crap trackpads I just can barely stand the computer at all--on my mac I never use an external mouse -- ever. I think the stupid / dirty / lame reason Apple switched to the retina MBP's is that they are easier to force people to upgrade.. super difficult to upgrade hardly anything, super lame..
I use VMWare Fusion like crazy and its awesome.. with a fast quad core CPU, SSD, and ~8-16GB of RAM, VM's are awesome on the MAC.
