This is my honest opinion that I'm posting here so that I may assist in anyone looking to purchase a T440s.  I ended up sending mine back and obtained a MacBook Pro 15 Retina, which now runs Windows 7 flawlessly.  I'm not here to discuss my Mac (and I still hate Apple as a company, lol), but I want to share the good and the bad things about my T440s experience:

The good:

- Oh so stylish... I love the minimalist business-like look.

- Very light.

- Very good screen (in my opinion... I got the HD version).

- Fairly capable performance-wise.  It calculated a Fibonacci(1 through 50) in C# in 20 minutes and some change, which was not as good as the other-mentioned laptop, but it was still pretty decent.  It also did amazingly with VS 2013 and Blend open at the same time.  No hang-ups, nothing.  And that was only with 4GB RAM, since I didn't install the 8GB stick (had no time, because of the repairs... more on that later).

- Battery life is superb.  Under full-on stress, which most people would never unleash on this machine, I was able to get 1 hour and 42 minutes out of it.  This was done using Battery Eater.  Therefore, one can easily expect 4+ hours under normal development.

- Good build, except the touchpad (more on that later).

- Amazing keyboard.  I'm speechless.  That thing was a dream to type on.  I would compare it closely to my mechanical keyboard.  Obviously, it's not as good, but I've never felt a better keyboard on a laptop.

- The fact that it has an internal and an external battery.  Hot swaps with spare packs... how awesome.

- Very slim, in my opinion.

The bad:

- The touchpad is horrible.  It feels like a two-cent piece of junk on a $1,500 laptop.  As soon as I got it I couldn't believe it.  My wife was in shock too.  It was very loud, even with light clicking and the rattling sound after the click was horribly annoying.  I sent it in for repair, and instead of fixing the touchpad (regardless of whether a new one was put in), they ended up misaligning the keyboard bezel, so the right side is popping up slightly as if it was forced onto the body.

Mind you, it's not like I was overly picky or anything.  This is a known problem, but I didn't do my homework prior to the purchase.  Also, the original gentleman on the phone (who was pretty awesome comparing to others) said himself that it was strangely loud.  I clicked it very softly and he was able to hear it on his side without my phone being on speaker or anything.  He tested a model next to him and I couldn't hear it.  He said his touchpad was very quiet.

- The drivers for the touchpad are pretty atrocious.   I was able to get it to 80% efficiency, but the cursor still jumped around when clicking once in a while.  This created a lot of frustration, as things were closed or opened accidentally.

- This is not particular to the laptop, but to the company... the customer support was horrible.  Most of them were polite, except the person that closed the chat session on me when I decided to question why the keyboard bezel was being replaced...  and him closing the chat session was not a technical issue (I asked the next rep to explain).  However, nothing got fixed and the laptop came back in worse condition than I sent it in.  I mean... it's a 2-hour old laptop and it already has misalignments and a scratch.  Yes, I forgot to mention that.  On the right side, it appeared as if they were trying to pry it open and put a slight scratch there... not ridiculously important, because it does not alter the performance and it was not very noticeable, but when coupled with the rest of the things... yeah, no go.

Would I recommend this laptop?  If you don't expect a good touchpad and never care to get it fixed, sure.  I would love to own if it had a different touchpad... but I'll just revisit this idea in five years or so.  You might also get lucky and get one that doesn't have the touchpad problem, but this might be a rarity from what I see on the forums.

I really have not had a problem with my 440s. Aside from the delays in shipping and no communication during that process the hardest part was getting rid of Win 8.1. I also am not a heavy trackpoint/pad user 95% of the time I use a mouse. I always have. When I do use the trackpad I am able to do what I need to do. I will admit from a user perspective it is rather clunky and I would have preferred the old style with buttons but it is workable for my use. I can see why heavy trackpoint/pad users would not like it. But if Lenovo decides to change back to the original style trackpad and offers a upgrade/downgrade/sidegrade I will do it as long as the price is reasonable. Perhaps they should offer it as an option. FWIW - I recently went on a business trip and the battery life was awesome, hot swap was sweet and it performed rather well. The touch screen is clean and crisp with minimal bleed during boot. Yes there is some and I have seen high dollar gaming laptops with more. The best part was plugging it in to a projector and not needing to set the resolution because it took care of it self. Flying home was nice because I was able to watch a movie that I had converted (I decided to not bring my tablet for this task) and used the touchscreen to do what I needed to do.  I must be one of the lucky ones.

Krystian_PL, I've never used any of the Lenovo products, so the blanket statement is incorrect.  I tried the tapping routine, but I'm heavy-handed and I almost always ended up tapping too hard, producing a click.  The cursor ended jumping around even more during the tapping.  I develop in .NET, so I do click around a lot and having a mouse is not always a good option (depending on the setting I'm in).

dizzbuster, I wish I was as lucky.  Just like you said, the hot swapping.... man, such a great idea.  That is one thing that was holding me back from returning the T440s.  It is a phenomenal machine, except the touchpad.  I'm pretty darn upset that I didn't get to keep it.

If I had more time on my hands, believe me I would try sending it back until they'd fix it (I expected that to happen the first time around... was that too much to ask?), but who knows how long that would take (based on some of the other users' experiences in this forum) and I need a laptop right now.  I have to travel to deployment sites with it and using a mouse in some of those environments is not an option.

@bkboggy: the only solution is that you should tap gentle and softly :) that you won't produce a click :)

Maybe You should go for an on-site guarantee, that might help not sending back Yours t440s :)
Regards,

Perhaps, but those seems like work-arounds for an existing issue.  If I spend a substantial amount of money on a product, I expect it to work.  I'm not sure what your budget is, but to me $1,500 is substantial.  Besides, I already returned it.

Lucky You! I paid almost 1 400 € for my t440s. US customers got better than EU prices :)

And it's all made in China in the end.  That's why mine was delayed.  It was stuck in China.

I agree on most of the OPs points, though the spotlight LG screens are annoying (I just adjusted the screen right after typing that to get a better angle), and the trackpoint is 10x less pleasant to use than on older models with dedicated buttons. The amount of force required to click sometimes results in not clicking when I think I am, and I've had to basically hack the registry just to use the middle click like a middle click. The main thing is that I now feel like it's a chore to use the trackpoint, and so I'm far more likely to feel a need for a mouse than I did on my T60. On that machine, I LOVED using the trackpoint, it felt interchangeable with a mouse. On this machine, it's unpleasant and annoying. The trackpad, used as a trackpad, is excellent, but half the reason I got a Lenovo was because I so loved the trackpoint (trackpads just seem inefficient and annoying, no matter how good they are.) Oh, and its SO loud, I'm embarrased to use it in a quiet room.

I've also had problems with various kinds of stability issues (esp. involving waking from sleep, but also those godforsaken AC7260 cards). Given the issues I've had, and the unpleasantness of the trackpoint, I'd be tempted to look more widely for a new computer if I had it to do over again, though I might have made the same choice in the end, not sure what the competition looks like right now.