eMachines has gotten much better if you guys didn't know that. They were purchased by Gateway, and their AMD64 Laptops PWN for the price! WIth Radeon 64MB 9700 Portable Graphics and AMD 3200+ Mobile with 1GB RAM, eMachines are getting VERY competitive.
Haha; nobody pays them to not use AMD. They don't. Contracts may be in place; but certainly not for this long if they wanted to use AMD. Even with Contracts; they can release different builds with AMD, and keep the contracted builds with Intel.
They do look quite nice. The Budget ones aren't so nice though. All the Towers are really nice though. The XPS is damn good, especially with Double Memory Free.