I don't have any experience with notebooks with Centrino, but I can give you one interesting link: www.gaisler.com -> Products -> Simulators
On this website you can find information about performance of TSIM-ERC32 (Instruction-Level Sim for Leon SoC) on diffrent platforms, included Centrino.
Also You can make a search on comp.arch.fpga group about nootebooks.
If you are going to buy notebook with Centrino, take the newest version of CPU, with 2MB of cache. The RAM memory should have at least 333MHz of freq.