I'll second the T430 series. I've had good luck with the T430u with the base configuration and ubuntu. Ubuntu installation was simple using a bootable USB drive and the latest Ubuntu desktop.
The screen on the T430u is not full HD, but cheaper than the regular T430 though.
I believe an SSD is available as an upgrade, but I suspect doing the upgrade yourself would be easy. I upgraded the RAM to 8 GB, which was an easy upgrade following the manual. The hard drive looks to be similarly easy to upgrade.
The keyboard is acceptable and I have found that I have adapted to it quickly.
I haven't pushed the battery life, but I would estimate 4-5 hours with web browsing and the screen brightness up.
I too upgraded the ram, just have to find one with the same timing on Amazon and pop it in(4gb stick). And as for the SSD I got myne on Newegg for $85 (128gb Samsung 840) also very simple to put in, remove a screw pull out the old and mount the new.
Those appear to be a list of anecdotes as opposed to a real analysis of who becomes wealthy and the means of their families in America. Unfortunately, I'm not familiar enough with the social science literature to fix the reference problem, but at least from the survey work presented in "The Millionaire Next Door", many of the wealthy American surveyed there did not appear to be from family money.
It doesn't seem very useful to know your overall electricity usage - your energy bill tells you that.
Your monthly electricity bill does give you a monthly snapshot of your last month's usage, but the primary point of these devices appears to be moment to moment usage stats. The instantaneous data can act as a feedback mechanism that a monthly snapshot makes difficult. Integrating power monitoring at the device level would also be a nice step forward.
