Can I just buy a $400 laptop with a SSD in it?
Intel is flogging ultrabooks because they use their high end Ivy Bridge processors. I, like almost everyone else, do not need any more CPU power. CPU is no where near the bottleneck. It is a rarity to see it jump over 10% for any reason. Slow spinning disk is the bottleneck. If they made skinny laptops with SSD but without the high end, unnecessary CPUs, then we would be talking (although I guess they have and call them tablets).
I know there are some people who will say, "but I edit 10,000 videos a day and am running financial models for the Fed on my laptop. I store on the range of 3 - 4 TBs on my laptop full of saved posts about how I need to have 3 - 4 TBs of storage on my laptop. I need the high end specs!" My answer is: use a server on the internet/company network. Servers are used for heavy processing and storing data. Client devices are there to show you what the server processed.