Looking at a few laptop choices...wanting some opinions

I found another at best buy here: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Toshiba+-+Satellite+Laptop+with+Intel%26%23174%3B+Core%26%23153%3B2+Duo+Processor+-+Midnight+Breeze/9576942.p?skuId=9576942&id=1218127626133

This looks like a great deal to me, but I'm not an expert so I may be missing something big. For one, I do not know much about Toshiba laptops though I do have a couple friends who say they have no complaints with theirs. Any opinions on how these four laptops compare?

It looks like the HP and Sony are just about the same. The Gateway does have a better CPU and a bigger hard drive. For general use, all of these are going to seem about equally fast. You could maybe go to the store and see if they had similar models to try out to see which are best.
As for the brands themselves, well I am not a huge fan of HP (seems like their laptops are kind of cheaply made), but they aren't any worse than any other lower end laptop maker. That Gateway looks like (though I could be completely wrong) it's kind of an older higher end model (I notice newegg has deactivated it). I don't know much about gateway. I've owned several of their old desktops (from the 90s) and they were good machines back then. No idea what their like today. Sony has a good reputation these days with their high end Vaio laptops, but I do not know much about this particular model. It looks about the same as the HP; thick, heavy plastic case, same CPU, same LCD, similar ports, etc.

If I were forced to make a choice between them, I'd pick the HP, because it looks like it's got the best feature set. However, any of them would be fine for basic computing.

HP touchpads are terrible. I thought I'd get used to mine, but I haven't. They have a sort of glossy cover over them, and as a result, they are very slick. Any sort of moisture on your fingers will ruin its tracking and it always feels less accurate than other touchpads I've used. It's highly frustrating, even as a user who uses a mouse a lot of the time.