I've recently found with Vaios that the overall durability depends a lot on when you buy it, and partly on how you treat it. In every generation they are less durable than ThinkPads, but in some generations, they hold their own against other consumer laptops more than usual. Some of the newest ones seem okay, and supposedly the flexion in the display if you open it from one point is intentional -- but some of the older fat vaios with plastic everywhere are worrisome, like they're going to become the PowerBook 520 of the mid-2000s. Plus, Sony has built a lot of very ugly computers over the years. (Some very pretty, and some of their more creative form factors are cool to look at and think up use cases for, but sometimes, it's just ugly.)

(Sidenote: I own a Sandy Bridge based Vaio VPC-SC, 13-inch. It's classified as an impulse buy for sure, but it does what I need, which is to be quite small and run the apps/games I want quickly.)

(Sidenote 2: Although I might be replacing it faster than I replaced my T400, because I'm finding that a life without TrackPoint is not very fun.)

Useful information: If you have a ThinkPad, grab this tool: http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/detail.page?LegacyDocID=TVSU-UPDATE

It grabs all of the driver updates available for your machine for you, in one swoop. It's one of the best things about ThinkPads.