13" vs 15" MacBook Pro comparison with premiere, final cut and vmware usage

I'm looking to get back into Macs after a long time away (SGI then PC).
I'd really prefer a top spec 13" MacBook Pro (rather than the 15) so long as it does what i want, i'm swapping a vaio for it so i'm used to a certain size.
I would be making use of various graphics apps - photoshop, premiere, after effects, modo, final cut as well as needing to run visual studio 2008 and having a complete PC development environment set up.
I know i can boot camp so that's always possibility although i would like to run vmware fusion ideally.
I'm not too fussed about the screen size because i run 2x 24" off my main machine for proper editing/development and if i do use the laptop for development i'd be plugged into a larger monitor on location somewhere.
My questions are how will the 9400M graphics card react to the above software? I don't play games so that's not an issue. Most 2D graphics software isn't that reliant on heavy 3D processing (except perhaps modo) but perhaps for the mac side of things that's not as true these days?
Is there anywhere where someone has benchmarked real applications on the 9600 vs 9400?
any advice or pointers would be very welcome!
cheers
paul

Hi,
I've been using my new 13" MBP for about a week now. I've been using Parallels to run XP/Vista/Windows 7 betas and occassionally Server 2003/8 on my MacPro for a couple of years and wanted a similar portable environment. I'm a .NET developer so I use VS2005/8, SQL Server 2005/8 and IIS for testing mostly C# code and database driven ASP.Net web applications.
I was sceptical about all of the above being achievable on this tiny machine (it replaces a much-loved Powerbook G4 and a one year old 15" Acer Aspire, which looks like a breezeblock in comparison) and was initially bracing myself to take the hit of the 2.6Ghz 15" machine with 256MB dedicated graphics. But the people at the Apple suggested I give the smaller, cheaper machine a fourteen day trial and so here I am building a Silverlight site with SQL server backend in Vista. It runs just fine and the sheer portability of this 13" machine along with its cheeky, pint-sized charm means that I'm sticking with it thanks very much
I may yet use bootcamp and run XP/Vista natively to squeeze out some performance gains, but this would be more due to geekish tendencies on my part than genuine need for a faster os.
I urge you to try the 13incher - you won't regret it!

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