My college used to sell the laptops for small businesses which had absolutely no advantage to students and was missing some of the entertainment features that students enjoy. Being business laptops, they were not as powerful and cost a lot more. I used to fight with them over it all the time 🙂
Business-market laptops are generally a whole lot more durable, and often a good deal lighter, and a good deal more expandable, than consumer-market models. Yeah, they tend to lack a few of the "entertainment features" (glossy and thus glare-prone screen, the ability to play a DVD without booting up, and media buttons, most notably) that consumer models have... but those are fluff.
As for cost, they're often only slightly more expensive, not "a lot more," depending on the exact model you get - and in some cases, once you add a comparable extended warranty and insurance to the consumer model, they're NOT more expensive.
As for "not as powerful," pretty much every manufacturer that I know of that makes a consumer line and a business line uses the same microprocessors, etc, in both.
It sounds more like your particular school was giving bad recommendations; it happens.
run Mac OS X (much more intuitive interface) and Windows at the same time
De gustibus, and all that. Also, running Windows at the same time (parallels or crossover office) has a big performance hit; to run Windows applications at full speed, you need to dual boot.
trackpad that scrolls when you use 2 fingers
As noted already, most PC laptops allow scrolling already, using a slightly different mechanism. Meanwhile, two disadvantages to Mac laptops:
1) No right mouse button for context-menus (although I'm told newer ones have some way to do it without doing option-click or command-click or whatever it used to be)
2) No pointing stick option - and pointing sticks are WAY better than touchpads if you touch type - can go from typing to "mousing" without removing your hands from the home row.
13 inch screen but has a full-size keyboard
PC laptops come in all shapes and sizes. Dell only recently introduced a 13" one, but plenty of other companies have sold them for years. Keyboards on 13"+ models have always been full-sized and these days the 12" widescreen models have a full-size keyboard as well. (For 12" non-wide, I don't think it's physically possible, except with the old IBM butterfly keyboard.)
802.11n wireless card standard
It's coming in on all the newest PCs, at least as an option. Buying draft-N products was a bad idea, given that "draft standard" parts often don't work as well as ones genuinely designed for the standards.
And indeed, it's far from clear that making everything to one standard is a good thing - personally, I'd say "choice is good!"
bluetooth standard (easier to communicate w/ many cell phones)
I don't find it very useful, but built-in bluetooth is available on virtually any decent laptop either standard or as an option. Where it's an option, you can choose whether it's worth the $25-30.
i haven't heard about a hard drive that shuts of automatically when being dropped,
Lenovo Thinkpads have that feature; I'm not aware of any Dells that do. Then again, I hadn't been aware Apple had copied it yet - as far as I knew, it was exclusive to Lenovo (innovation from the IBM days.)
