I edit on an Asus G53SW, i7Q, 16GB Ram, GTX460M 1.5GB, and it works great. With the new Asus G55 (or G75), with the GTX600 series cards, that would be a lot better (twice the CUDA cores compared to my GTX460M).
While I haven’t used a SSD via USB3.0, I do use the BMD Intensity Shuttle USB3.0 card. It’s sending uncompressed HD over USB3.0, and I haven’t had a single issue with it during ingest.
Ouch, that does suck. I too edit on a laptop, since I travel a lot. But as mentioned, I left OSX last summer and went back to Windows. Haven’t had the issues that I had with OSX since the switch.