I seriously doubt that any currently available laptop can effectively work with a 1 GB QlikView document... Even with 8 GB of memory and the fastest available processors, it's going to crawl... My recommendation would be to keep those large documents on the development server and RDP into the server for development.
If the requirement is definitely to open large documents on a mobile computer, then - yes, get the biggest and the fastest you can afford.
I'm assuming your QVW is compressed (the default) so it's hard to know how much RAM it might need, but 3-5 times is typical. I have an 8GB dual processor i5 64bit laptop and can easily develop any doc that will fit in the 8GB RAM.
sure the actual RAM footprint needs to fit into your memory to avoid swapping, so 8 GB might be tight (well, I think one could easily look at the actual RAM footprint, given that the qvw already exist).
But today's laptops offer even a lot more, you might need to watch out, but what do you think about 32 GB and an Intel i7 (e.g. available from Dell's precision line)? Don't want to sell here, though...
pjin - it seems to me your root cause is the size of your .qvw file. If you want to avoid catch-up with technology (exiting, but expensive game) - I would first look at ways to optimize your file. One way is to use the document_analyzer - from Rob Wunderlich's site and remove unused fields. Also if you search the blog for optimization techniques - there are quite a few of them available.
