More than enough power for linux gaming, and about 500 EUR cheaper than a similar gaming framerate windows GE laptop! A hell of a lot of difference!
Very good move by MSI!
Of course it's also possible to install a recycled version of Windows on these and just save money lol, but in essence they are the first ever Linux Gaming laptops by a major manufacturer that I know of that are sold in the Western world.
What's the difference in them having Linux onboard? If you use linux, you'll install your favorite distro right away.
If you don't want to pay for windows, just buy a laptop without OS. I have no problems finding ones like that. For example, a year ago I bought Lenovo Y580 with i7-3610QM and GTX 660M, without OS, for 800 euros. It was 768p version though.
The "gaming" marketing for a linux laptop (doesn't come with any particular distro preloaded, just with FreeDOS for testing) by a big brand, that's the difference.
There is no fun in getting a Haswell notebook when you're a linux gamer, because Intel has some hardware design problems that show in an open source OS, and doesn't quite seem to get it's iGP solution sorted on Haswell, so Ivy does perform better than Haswell on most open source machines.
A gaming laptop like that is also desktop replacing on linux, because there is no need to buy much more powerful machines and still have a slower system. But a 1080p display on the other hand is very practical.
At the end of 2012, they were almost giving laptops away, I got a bunch of Asus X/V series i7 ivy quad core + nvidia 650m + 1080p 17.3" displays + SSD + HDD + Windows preinstall for about 700 EUR a piece incl. VAT, and I think this year at the end of the year, prices will be even lower. But that's not the point I'm trying to make, the point is that it's a gaming laptop without windows preloaded. Even Alienware doesn't do that, and Dell has been selling linux laptops since the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Imo, it's a good thing for a gamer that doesn't play windows games, and needs different hardware specs than a windows gamer. Maybe I'm overenthusiastic about these things, who knows... I don't care, but with the bling features of such hardware, it's a lot cooler than the usual "business oriented" linux laptops, no?