Should I get the 17 inch MacBook Pro, Dell Precision M6600, Lenovo Thinkpad W520, or the HP EliteBook 8760 W

I already own an old MacBook Pro running Core 2 Duo processor and have no problems with it. I was told by my friends not to go with the new Snow Leopard Operating system as they crash often and produce very slow performance. I am not sure if they will resolve all these issues in Lion. I do intensive work on Adobe and Autodesk products and I require an extremely fast processor, best display, and graphics card. If I choose MBP, I will take the anti-glare screen as I also do desktop publishing. I also don't understand why Apple doesn't ship their MacBook Pro's with Nvidia Quadro or ATI FireGL pro graphics cards. I was told that they are better cards for working with Pro apps. Are there any benefits of choosing Quadro or FireGL instead of GeForce or Radeon. I also saw the comments at Apple store and almost all have given the least possible rating to Quadro cards for Mac Pro. I don't wanna spend money unnecessarily if there will be problems with compatibility and I am also considering if I should switch to a PC as Snow Leopard is very slow. I also wonder how the gaming performance is in the Pro GPU's.

Your friends don't know what they're talking about.  SL is quite good...  far better than Leopard in my experience.  The issue is that many people have systems that get screwed up a little bit, and then they install some major update, and suddenly a slightly screwed up system becomes badly screwed up.  (Imagine building a second floor on a house with undiscovered structural defects.)  This is often unfairly blamed on system updates...  if you rely on word of mouth, every version of the Mac OS ever has been the worst ever. 
Of course, I've got no experience with Autodesk.  Perhaps Autodesk has issues with SL, if your friends are all using it and having problems.  SL did change a lot under the hood, so older software may be incompatible with it.

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