About the heat, I PERSONALLY have had NIGHTMARES and troubles with EVERY Dell I owned (and have heard some bad stories of Alienware since the Dell buyout); and what Macs are good at is running with the fan off as long as possible, not necessarily the cooling itself, AFAIK a few iMacs from a couple of years back were shooting their GPUs in the face because of that. I like Clevo-based PCs and MSI myself, I find Asus not bad at all but overpriced and walk (or rather run) away from Dells outside the professional environment. Of course Clevo and MSIs are made of plastic which some find tacky but I couldn't care less really.
I just got a Clevo-based one an am really happy with it regarding quality/preformance/price:
15inch 1080p matte screen
4800MQ (2.7GHz to 3.7GHz)
GTX 770m 3GB GDDR5
16GB RAM 2x8GB (2 free slots up to 32GB RAM) DDR3(L?) 1600MHz
2x120GB Crucial M500 RAID0
2x500GB/8GB Hybrid Seagate slimdrives RAID0
1xBluray reader/writer
Killer Wireless N + Bluetooth
Backlit 3-section keyboard
Backlit trackpad + fingerprint reader
Subwoofer
180W PSU
Artic Silver paste (cannot remember which one).
It does the Optimus dance.
I cannot stress the CPU over 79ºC with Prime95 and the like and Skyrim all maxed out with 16xantialiasing and 8xanisotropic at 1080p doesn't get the GPU over the 80ºC mark (my right side of the keyboard goes yellow when it surpasses that temp, I have a monitor, and I have never seen it yellow; I don't know the exact temperature but I know it's in between 60 and 79ºC
).
It has dual cooling and is fairly fat (that's how it keeps the heat away
) but that's what you get for such performance; it's also fairly silent when gaming because the vents on the back are seriously big, the fans don't have to work a lot to cool it even if it's beasty.
That costed 1900€ with shipping costs so not bad at all (I wanted a cheaper GPU but they didn't offer it with that model, I am not a gamer really, only got Skyrim to check the GPU now that I had to pay for it
others can save on the Bluray, wireless card and RAIDing); I however bought it in Europe from a german site (mysn.de or mysn.eu) that ship to the UK (mysn.co.uk).
The 1GB/s reading off the SSDs is sexy though
compiling the whole Android framework took around 8 hours on my old laptop; now with CCACHE enabled I can get it all compiles a LOT faster (the SSDs and the 16GB of RAM + CPU REALLY help on that)
and I never though I would use the fingerprint reader but it's quite a lot faster than typing the password in, I use it quite a lot now
Trackpad is iffy but not too bad, keyboard is brilliant, sound I find really decent and it has an LED that tells you when the Nvidia/ATI is powered, which I find genious.
PCSX2 of course runs brilliantly, I completed Jak3 and SotC at 1080p with the CPU constatly turboboosting at slightly over 3.5GHz so no problems with slowdows
You should check Clevo-based resellers in the US (Origin PC, Sager, Mythlogic or something like that, Malibal, ...) there are many with good laptops at a good price; it's something to consider. Honestly what Alienware do better is the HDMI in (how I would love that) and the new ones are Aluminium AFAIK.
Hope that helps you
EDIT: Oh and in the US they are cheaper so my setup you might find for 1900$ in the US (but of course with import taxes here it isn't worth it).