Why so few i7 Mobile notebooks on the market?

Quad cores aren't really necessary for most people in notebooks. Even among business goers, most of their notebooks are used merely for office applications. The dual core is the best balance between power and battery life. Most people who have quad cores can't utilize them, and have no need for them. Manufacturers cater to most people. Therefore, most of the notebooks are dual-core.

They might also be using the consumer lines to see how many people want to adopt the new processors. If no one really seems to want them, then why bother or vice versa.

As far as that goes, most of the Core2 lines use motherboards using the PM45 chipsets or some variant there of (there are actually quite a few of them). The i7's only use the PM55 and these are the only boards that support them. I think once they catch on a bit more, you will see Dell and HP update more of their lineups.

The low power chips are on the market already, they are just hugely expensive. The thing is, mass market laptop providers don't cater to the high end nor do all but 1 or 2 actually build laptops. IBM, Toshiba, HP, Dell, etc have all their laptops built by an ODM (Original Design Manufacturer). The "custom shops" included like Alienware, Falcon NW, VoodooPC, WidowPC use or have at one time or another used Clevo as their ODM.

Clevo has a US distributor named Prostar that sells you the same box as those other guys (sans fancy paint and logo for about 2/3 the price). Here's a model that can be configured with the i7 920XM mobile CPU

http://www.pro-star.com/index.cfm? [...] d=10031877

Expect to pay about $3k for an I7 920xm mobile equipped laptop built by an ODM distributor ....a bit more from a mass market label.