While most of the world seems to be raving about netbooks and budget computing, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks hunkered down in the Labs, ploughing through the forthcoming Ultimate Laptop Labs test.

It’s been an illuminating test for many reasons – not least the chance to test a dozen of the world’s most extravagant notebooks – but one of the most interesting themes to come out of this particular Labs is that the march of progress is, indeed, inevitable.

This is plain to see by comparing the line-ups from issue 169’s Luxury Laptops Labs and the dozen machines that we’ve got lined up for our Ultimate Laptop face-off.

Last year, for instance, there were no quad-core processors in sight: the fastest was a 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 crammed into the Sony VAIO VGN-FW11ZU. Almost everything else in the Labs was a T-series Core 2 Duo. Contrast that with the parts inside the Ultimate Laptops: alongside plenty of powerful dual-core parts there are quad core processors and even an Extreme-Edition quad core CPU that delivered the best benchmark score we’ve ever seen from a notebook.

Portable graphics hardware has seen a healthy upgrade over the last twelve months, too. Most systems last year had Nvidia GeForce 8000-series parts, with one – the Dell XPS M1730 – including two in SLI configuration. This year, the sea-change in the desktop graphics market is also evident in notebooks: most machines this month sport ATI chips, with a couple including explosive CrossFireX.

Consequently, year-on-year performance has seen a huge leap: last year, the highest 2D benchmark score was 1.4, but this year, it’s 1.59 – and, with quad core processors in tow, multi-threaded applications don’t pose a threat like they used to, either.

Gamers will be pleased by progress, too: one year ago, five systems in the Labs couldn’t cope with our medium-quality Crysis benchmark, but now one system has ploughed through the very high-quality test – which most desktop PCs struggle with – at 30fps.

Components aside, the features included with these expensive machines have improved dramatically. The last time we tested £1,000+ laptops, HDMI ports and eSATA sockets were rarely seen luxuries, but now they’re so common that we’re disappointed when they aren’t included.

A year ago, standard hard disks with capacities of 250GB or 320GB were deemed excessive – but, this month, 500GB is more common, and several machines have SSD drives as a main system drive alongside a normal disk for storage. One even has a pair of smaller SSD drives in RAID 0 for lightning-quick access.

Plenty of other features used to be exotic but are now par for the course. Blu-ray drives are popping up on any laptop with a screen large enough to handle HD resolutions, and DisplayPort outputs were featured on four systems on test – with the Apple MacBook Air and Pro including Mini DisplayPort instead of Mini DVI, which featured a year ago.

Such obvious progress in every area makes for interesting contrasts, but it also begs the obvious question – what will be in the world’s best laptops in another twelve months?

Let me know which features you’d like to see – or what developments and innovations you think will be next year’s breakthrough mobile technology – in the comments section below.