I'm not going to get deep into this, but a MacBook is what you're looking for. There is a bit of a relearning curve to Mac OSX compared to Windows, but nothing you shouldn't be able to figure out quickly. Not bad, just "different". You can get into a MacBook for $949 w/ Military or Student pricing.
At this stage in the game, I'd only recommend a PC Laptop to a power user who knows their way around Windows, and how to fix the problems associated with it when they crop up, or someone that is married to a piece of PC-only software.
If you did get a PC, the only one's I might be able to recommend are Lenovo's ThinkPad line. Not their budget stuff. HP/Toshiba/Gateway is junk nowadays. Dell is okay I guess, had one as my company computer, nothing special. Sony has generally by higher priced boutique things, but has been coming down recently. Can't say much about ASUS besides the fact that they aren't very mainstream laptop wise. One's I've seen generally have good build quality, but tend to be vanilla/generic.
As to the value you are getting for $949, the Mac comes preloaded with iLife '09 which is a really nice software suite. iPhoto will import you pictures off camera/memory card and organize them by event, tag people's faces, upload quickly to MobileMe/Flickr/Facebook, and let you order calendars/photo albums/prints easily. iMovie and iDVD are great for video editing and making DVDs. View some cool videos here that explain how they work:
http://www.apple.com/ilife/ . Additionally, your Mac won't need Virus and Spyware protection, so you save $$ there by not purchasing.
You may pay a bit more up front, but I highly doubt you'll regret it. I was a long time PC user and Mac hater (why are they so expensive? blah blah apple tax blah blah stupid OS X), but they really are better built hardware and software. Stuff just works, quite the opposite of many PCs out of the box. There are a lot of "Ah ha!" moments, where you wonder why you ever did without this. I've turned a lot of people onto Macs and no one has been disappointed.