Hey Mike,
I bought a Core i5 460M build into a Toshiba laptop last week. With 4GB RAM and this processor with 2,8GHz in turbo mode I am totally satisfied.
I am not that much into hardware benchmarks but as far as I am informed the AMD processors are a bit less powerful than the intel processors. I have never bought an AMD since my Athlon XP 1700 broke. This is years ago, 6 or more, and I did not like this processor because although it should have the same power than an Intel had it could not fullfill the promise. But: this is years ago, time is a healer

It is a matter of taste beneath the facts. If you would ask me I would say: buy an Intel!
Short addition: Did you know that all i-processors come from the same wafer? If you are building CPUs you use fotolithographic methods that have some deviations when they are used to build nano technology chipsets. So in fact in the middle of a waver everything is fine while on the edges of the wafer the quality of the fotolithographic method decreases. So the i7 processors are from the center of the wafer and the i3 processors are from the edge. This is what they told us at university and first time I could use this knowledge in "the real world"

This is a problem for AMD CPUs too, but I do not know any modells and the variations.
Stick with an Intel

Greetings,
Steve