Asus i7 2nd gen notebook

Depends what you're planning to use it for. I'm using the one in my signature line as a development workstation and VMWare host, and couldn't be happier... But I don't game at all, so I may not be the right guy to talk to if your usage will be very different from mine.

I only do a little bit of gaming, but I mostly run stimulations on my laptop.

Given that, I think you would be very happy with the ASUS Sandy Bridge machines. The GT540M is supposed to be a decent mid-range laptop GPU, but I've never played anything more taxing than flash games on it so I don't know where it would start bogging down.

I can't say how the ASUS products compare to the Clevo-based offerings (Sager, XoticPc, Malibal, CyberPower, etc...), in terms of build-quality since I've never played with any of them in person, but my ASUS N53sv seems solid.

The Clevo-based resellers do offer the advantage of flexibility in configuration (some let you get unit with NO OS and/or No HDD, and most don't charge outrageous amounts for extra memory), which may be a deciding factor for you.