ThinkPad W530 Portable Workstation | Lenovo (CA)
To get a better rendering experience through CAD or digital art creation like 3dMAX or Maya, you'll need a workstation class graphics card. Those fall into ATI FireGLs or Nvidia Quadros. Normal video cards like a Nvidia geforce or ATI HD won't give you any extra processing power when it comes to rendering 3D objects.
The laptop linked also has a LCD upgrade with a colour calibration to get better colour accuracy when you're doing photoshop and it has a 1080p screen.
I don't know about batter life. [edit] upon further research, laptopmag clains that is has around 6 hour battery life.[/edit] I would assume that's not using the graphics card, but with light use only, where the graphics card is turned off using, what i would guess, optimus.
Lenovo ThinkPad W530 Review | Workstation Reviews
Lenovo ThinkPads have legendary keyboards that are a delight to type on and are all black with a magnesium chassis.
Programming in an IDE is pretty light for the most part, most programs that let you code should run instantly, except MS.net....
Matlab is a monster of a program to launch. Get an SSD and you should be a big difference. Not only in Matlab but starting up all of your programs.
I find that the more RAM you have, the faster Photoshop does its tasks. Especially for big files.
I am a ThinkPad fanboy.