I have the same MacBook Pro as Brian but with 16gb of Ram (Smoke never uses anywhere near that on mine, but I can run other software and also not worry about rebooting too often).
I also have the 6tb version of the Pegasus that runs as RAID5. I used to run it off the system drive but since I've been using the Pegasus I've found that I can easily run multiple streams of HD 444. The raid reads about 600MB/s and around 440MB/s for writes. Although I don't have Brian's Linux/HP/Quadro config, I find it to be very responsive and I can place a few things in action and move things around in space. Of course while Action comps don't play back smoothly until I render, I have a feel of pretty transparent interaction when dragging things around, orbiting, etc.. All other modules work really well and colour correction plays back almost in realtime on HD1080 footage. I also have a 24 inch Apple monitor so the interface is in full 1920x1200 and then I use the macbook pro screen for the fullscreen output (or vice versa if I want). I've also plugged it into a plasma screen and used that for DVI output.
I also purchased a 256gb SSD drive last week and installed that in the system drive bay. I also removed the DVD drive (don't use it very much at all anymore) and placed the original 750gb drive in that. So now it boots off the SSD. From turning the power on it takes around 14 seconds for the mac desktop to appear. It then only takes around 35 seconds for Smoke to boot up. So while I used to find "booting" Smoke to be the most frustrating thing (before the Pegasus RAID became my main framestore), now with the SSD Smoke starts up even faster and also closes down faster. While it used to feel like a major expedition to start Smoke up it now take no time at all from turning the computer on. I also use the SSD as a framestore now when I can't be bothered to lug the Pegasus around. It reads at around 500MB/s and writes at 220MB/s, so its not that much slower than the RAID at reading, though of course it is a lot smaller. It just feels weird to be playing back two streams of Uncompressed 444 HD on a laptop without the RAID plugged in.
The one complaint really: although hard imports and renders play back beautifully (with the RAID and/or SSD), as do ProRes and RED footage, I find Canon H264 and MXF files play back pretty choppily. I was hoping that MXF would speed up with my RAID but it looks like these files really are too processor intensive to play back as soft importson, at least on this iteration of the MacBookPro. Here I wish that Autodesk would work more on the decoding algorithms for some soft imports . I know that it is targeted as a finishing system that works in most properly on hard imports (and since buying my RAID, I totally see this and see it the more and more I use it), it still would be great to play back footage in some other formats as well as Avid or FCP do. I tried the same MXF footage on our MC at work and it played back really smoothly. Still given a choice I would obviously choose to work in Smoke any day at the cost of transcoding to uncompressed.
So with these four main additions (16gb, 24 Monitor, Pegaus R6, SSD) to the base MacBook Pro Smoke feels like a very responsive "machine". All of this obviously with the proviso that I have not used the Smoke Advanced/Linux system.
Cheers
Tony
P.S. You can obviously plug in an external keyboard if you like and the future looks like offering faster LightPeak/Thunderbolt and so graphics cards will become modular add-ons a little like a RAID. So although the graphics card in the MBP is relatively weak (but its still pretty responsive), it's only a short matter of time before the graphics bus folds seamlessly out into the outside world. Modularity is the future?
HP Z840, 80GB Ram, Quadro M6000x24GB