At a similar pricelevel, more power, SSD and even lower weight than the Macbook Air 13" you could look at the Sony Vaio Z.
Refurbished models can be found in Sony's outlet for even less.
I myself currently have the Vaio S13P with sheet battery if you want a portable gaming machine that can last 10-12 hours with the sheet battery.
I did however swap out the harddisk for a SSD and added 4 GB of ram myself. Sony's upgrades can be horribly expensive.
how's the build quality on a sony? i've never heard good things about vaios other than their looks, and the one i owned was flimsy and had pretty awful hardware for linux (granted that's my choice but i still like to support companies that use better than bottom-of-the-barrel OEM parts).
The body itself is really rigid because of the magnesium. The lid is made of carbon fiber in my case and is really flexible. I don't really care though, it doesn't seem to hurt the laptop except for some imprints of the keys on my screen if I stuff it in there with the rest of my gear. But no real complaints even from other users of broken screens.
It's slim, light and can be very powerfull.
The separate graphics card is a dream and is a little monster when bios modded to run at twice the speed. Shame Sony decided to lock that option and Sata 3 speeds in their Win 8 models.
The only letdown is the screen quality. It's mediocre but high resolution. Some brave souls have replaced the standard TN panel with a IPS one. Maybe I'll do that some day.
For some reason I feel like Sony makes laptops like PC-users want, but you need to be familiar and willing to tweak it a little bit for it to run perfectly. So it would not be a straight recommendation for anyone.
