Well I am sorta in the same boat. I just graduated from a design school in NYC and now starting to freelance, and started out with a Macbook Pro 2ghz, and upgraded to 2GB of ram. While this was great for being portable, I found myself doing 90% of my work at home connected to an LCD and keyboard and Wacom. The main problem I had was the MBP would overheat, and become unstable. It was plenty fast for doing design related stuff. In photoshop a 2pg 300dpi spread was slippery smooth on CS3.
I ended up selling the laptop for $1600 and buying a MacPro 2.66 and upgraded to 5gb of ram. It smokes now and is more than enough for my uses. And works more efficiently (and cooler!) than the MBP. I find this better for my needs, but I hate not being able to go to the coffee shop and work....not a biggie though.
You will
not want to trust your laptops LCD for a softproof before press, even in a CMYK colorspace there was a huge differance in color and tonal depth comparing my matte MBP (15") vs my Eizo Coloredge CE (which cost almost as much as the MBP). Even if your just printing out 11x14's for your folio, it can get expensive to make a mistake at print. I also tried to cheap out with an acer 24" lcd and had to sell it weeks after, while it was better than the laptop it just wasn't cutting it for softproofing. I would try and get set up with a 20" cinema display, get a refurb if you have to (and the quality might be better!). While I don't like the consistancy of the cinema displays, a good one will do just fine. Just make sure to hardware calibrate it with something intermediate like the Pantone eye-one LT or the cheaper spyder calibrators. (the cheap huey's didn't impress me, dunno about the new "pro" ones) I use the Pantone Eye-One LT and it works great, adjust's Kelven temp, gamma, lcd brightness (work with dim color corrected lighting if you can) and with updates allows you to monitor ambient light brightness/temp.
While the MBP is faster in more way than just the video card, the Macbook will probably last you for right now, when you really need the extra power later it will be time to upgrade anyway. I would suggest that you don't bury yourself in debt to have all the newest gadgets, it's tempting I know....but when it comes down to it, is waiting 2-3 more seconds to run that filter worth the extra $800-$1000? nope. Now your display is much more important for your field of work. While I sometimes regret going into deeper into debt with it...it's nice but a cinema display would do just fine for design, though I won't have to upgrade for 5+ years with the 24" Eizo so theres a tradeoff I guess.
And I know I wrote a book but in Design/Print....correct color is everything, a good monitor and hardware calibration setup and lastly correct color managment workflow is a must (PM me if you need help with that)
From a design student to another this is my list of what you should buy (and even though it's easy to spend your money, i'm making a list of what I would do over again and I don't have money to burn) Also student discounts can be very close to refurb prices for cheaper stuff.
Macbook 2ghz, upgrade to 2-3GB of ram, Omni is what I use
20" Cinema display (23" is nice for the $240 extra if you have it)
Pantone Eye-One LT
Adobe CS3 Design Suite
Suitcase Fusion (for font management)
Wacom Tablet (Graphires are great starters)
If you don't need the mobility, there's 2.66 MP's going for $1500-1700, thats an awefull lot of power that won't need updated for awhile.
Some links that might help ya:
Pantone Eye-One LT $139
Cinema Refurb: $499
