Laptop for Photoshop - GPU (Nvidia vs AMD) + Display (IPS vs TN) questions - please help

Question

Hi, I am helping someone with getting a new laptop for PhotoShop work, and am very confused about a couple of things.
Hoping that the pros on this forum can help.
1. Dedicated Graphics card - needed or not?
    If needed, AMD Radeon/FirePro (difficult to find on laptops) or Nvidia GeForce GTX 6xxM/7xxM or Quadro?
2. Suggestions on laptops with an IPS panel and wide color gamut.
Re. 1 - this is very confusing. From what I researched, the new Photoshop versions (CS6 and above) do use the GPU very effectively, and are using OpenCL rather than CUDA. Yet there are people on some forums that say that a GPU is not needed unless editing video.
My friend is not editing video - he is using Photoshop to create Digital Art. He does use all of the Photoshop features in his work. No 3D work, no video editing. The end result is Printed artwork - sometimes large prints 3 ft x 4 ft printed with geeclee on canvas/high quality paper.
Is a GPU needed, and if so is it better to get the AMD cards (Radeon most likely) that seem to completely outperform the GeForce cards in OpenCL at least?
Most of the laptops available seem to have the GTX 6xxM or 7xxM cards, and I read on one forum that the OpenCL functions are disabled on these cards. Read on another forum that it can be re-enabled with a hack. Thorougly confused. Please help.
Re. 2 - This too is confusing. Seems like an IPS panel has the best color rendition, but then they do not cover the entire color spectrum - or at least not as widely as the TN panels. If this will be the only monitor for work, is an IPS panel the best way to go or is it better to get a TN with wide gamut? Are there laptops with both - an IPS panel and a wide color gamut - without breaking the bank?
Currently the Sager/Clevo machines, and some MSI models, and ASUS models seem to be the best candidates. Had to rule out Dell Precision 6700/4700 and HP Elitebook 8770W/8570W due to price, but considering refurbished ones.
I am working with a $1200 budget with maybe some stretchability. Any advice/suggestions will be much appreciated.

Answer 1

At the potential risk of your pretending to kick me off what you misguidedly perceive as your thread—which by the way you would have no right to do, since you do not own a thread just because you started it—I'll have a couple of comments on your original thoughts.
There's no reason to be "confused" here.
1.— Utilization of the GPU is indeed always beneficial to using recent versions of Photoshop, regardless of whether you work with video or not.  Whether you "need it or not" is a different discussion.
2.— Of course it's absolutely necessary to be able to work with a monitor that has a narrower gamut than your working space or even your output target profile.  In my case, for example, as I'm 99.9% concerned with high quality prints, I work exclusively in ProPhoto RGB.  I'd be in a pickle if I were to restrict my work to just what I can see on any monitor regardless of how wide its gamut were.
One just has to learn how to work in Photoshop.  That's what  Gamut Warning and Soft Proofing are there, for example.  Printers are capable of printing some colors that are not visible on any monitor.
3.—  If both the video card and/or its driver fail to support Open GL and Shader Model, no "hack" on Earth can make up for it.
4.— If someone came to me for advice on a laptop on which to run Photoshop  well, my main and perhaps only goal would be to dissuade that person from wasting his or her money.
I know there might be flak from some laptop users for that immediately preceding paragraph, but hopefully not as much as you're likely to get—and deservedly so—from Mac Pro users for your astonishingly uninformed comments on those machines. 
One thing is having a laptop as a second machine on which to show your Photoshop work to clients and prospective clients when forced to, and another one is trying to use a laptop as one's main, working Photoshop machine.
Going to a laptop publication (which I gather the obscure, niche-market "NBR" you cite is) for information on whether to use one or not is like seeking theological religious advice about world religions from the Pope in the Vatican or the Ayatollah in Tehran. 
5.— In the past I had run Photoshop on a variety of different nVidia GeForce cards with up to 512 MB of VRAM, but with Photoshop CS6's more advanced utilization of the GPU I have moved to a mutant, factory-overclocked, flashed ATI Radeon HD 5770 with 1 GB of VRAM driving side-by-side dual 22" monitors in my current desktop Mac Pro 2.66 GHz under OS X Lion 10.7.5 and I couldn't possibly be happier.
I do run my second copy of Photoshop on my Mac Book (not "Pro") laptop with its stock Intel GMA 950 video circuitry and its paltry  64 MB of shared system memory, and it works just fine for the aforementioned purposes of showing  Photoshop work to others.  I wouldn't want to do any editing in Photoshop on that machine other than for minor touch-ups in an emergency, however.
Lastly, I feel compelled to add that, in my opinion, basic human decency would dictate that you offer Trevor some sort of apology for your presumptuousness in asking him to leave this thread.  If I hadn't already begun typing this post before you posted your #6, I might have just ignored your thread.  Considering the overall anti-laptop tenor of this post, you may well wish I had.