Have you considered the sony vaio Z? You can get a 1080p screen, 2 SSDs in a raid 0 or 1 configuration, a DVD/Blu-Ray player (think you can put another HD here instead), core i7 processor, decent battery life (6/7 hours), standard amounts of RAM, 13" and 3 pounds. It will blow your air out of the water while being the same weight and size. It's about 0.5" thicker although.
I do iphone development, so I'm stuck with what apple has to offer, but if I didn't that would be my machine of choice.
I did consider it, actually. The thing is, I need to use the Adobe suite a lot, much of that for graphics work, and I loathe Windows. If all I did now was code, I'd consider a Vaio running linux...I would say that's a better value overall if you don't need to do any graphics. I toyed with the idea of getting one and hackintoshing it, but I wasn't really committed to the headache of potentially having a brand new machine play badly with software I need to use daily.
Also, to the poster who wrote about the MBP vis-a-vis video...Yeah. Firewire is what's missing from this machine. I don't do any video work at all anymore so it doesn't bug me. But it would.
I do iphone development, so I'm stuck with what apple has to offer, but if I didn't that would be my machine of choice.