Well, I'll do my best to present the case as I see it. I don't have the current Gateway, but I have the 7422GX and I'm impressed with it. I have no experience at all with the HP model you mentioned, nor have I done the research you have.
If it were me, and it came down to a Gateway vs. a similar HP, I'd take the Gateway every time.
Out of all the PCs I've ever worked on, only the now extinct IBM Craptiva series has historically given me more trouble than ANY computer from HP. Things that should be simple are made unbelievably difficult due to HP's processes. They throw up every idiotic roadblock imaginable to every little thing. It's difficult to be more specific than this, but every time I get called to service an HP, whether it be software or hardware related, I automatically double the time on the estimate. Sometimes I get lucky and can get it fixed quickly, but my estimates are usually spot on. Gateway isn't perfect by any stretch, but I don't have nearly the same troubles with them.
Also, I've been catching interviews of the CEOs of both companies. Gateway's has been around for a bit, HP's CEO is really new. I really like the attitude and planned direction of the Gateway CEO. He wants to undo the problems that started Gateway's downward spiral and kept them down for so long.
HP's old CEO had the attitude to increase profits by increasing the value of the product. I liked her attitude, but never really saw any fruits from it. HP sucked about as bad when she was fired as it sucked when she started. Investors didn't like her attitude, as it went along the lines of "you have to spend money to make money". Investors are generally stupid people that think that money should just magically appear, and if it doesn't then some executive has to be blamed. The replacement CEO is more to their liking. He walked in flapping his gums about a bunch of stupid rhetoric, but the only thing he's actually done to date is layoff 1/3 of HP's workforce. Other than that, his only value would appear if you wanted to raise the ambient temperature of a room without buying heating equipment. I haven't seen exactly how the layoffs were enacted across the company, but given examples set by other retarded CEOs like this, it's a safe bet that no senior executives or management was lost. That means the layoffs mostly affected the people who actually produce. The people who are building the computer you buy will have lost one of every three people in their department, but of course they're expected to build the same number as before. The people you call for help will have to answer the same number of calls they did before every third cubicle was emptied. The people who will have to repair your laptop if you send it in under warranty will be expected to repair the same amount as they did before 1/3 of the repair team was sent to the unemployment line. These people probably all consider themselves to be overworked, underpaid, and rushed to get finished. Whether they or the CEO is right is completely irrelevant. These aren't the type of people I want to purchase something from that I need to be reliable.
To continue that thought, nothing breeds success like success. By reducing their workforce by 1/3, HP WILL make more money, in the short-term at least. When HP starts losing money again because people are tired of the shoddy work and move to other vendors, HP's response will no doubt be to lay some more people off. Employees know this, and they also know how management thinks. Among the first people to be laid off will be some of the more talented workers. To give you an example, when I took my first IT job in a call center, I was assigned to "shadow" their "best" employee. I was listening to him take a call from a client who called in and said she was running really low on disk space. Without batting an eye, he told her to defragment her hard drive. I was thinking, if this is the best person here, I'm going to be running this center in a week! I looked at him and told him that was the single most ignorant answer I'd ever heard. His response? "Yeah, I know. But they don't pay us to work well, they pay us to work fast." Unfortunately, my sense of ethics never allowed me to work that way. During my short tenure there, I permanently fixed more problems than any of my co-workers and quickly became known as the "go-to" man for tough issues, but I spent a great deal of time being talked to by my supervisor about my poor attitude and why my work level would never allow me to be promoted if I didn't shape up. That was the only job I've ever had that I just flat walked out on. It didn't take long to figure out that it was the call center mentality, and very few other call centers treat their employees any differently.
So, with that in mind, and HP already having gone through some layoffs, you can bet their best talent is looking for other jobs or already gone. Any really rotten workers left over will go in the next round of layoffs, as will any remaining people who work "well, but slow". That's going to leave you with a ton of mediocrity across the board.
With HP's past as a backdrop, and their future looking quite dim indeed, it's a brand I think you should think strongly about before buying. I don't possess any clairvoyant abilities, so I could well be wrong, but my money isn't going into any HP coffers any time soon, and we are moving our primary printer recommendations from HP to Brother and Dell.
As for the video in the Gateway unit, all I can tell you is that I have been pleasantly surprised by the MR9550 in my 7422GX, as I was with the MR9600 in the m6809 I bought last year. It isn't much on synthetic benchmarks, but it holds up remarkably well in games, and I never overclock. I don't know what to tell you to expect with yours, but mine does a lot more than I ever thought it could.
Appreciate the reply though. I have had the opposite experience:
