One of the really neat feature of the recent Macbook Pro/Air is the provision of the Thunderbolt port (or two in MBP Retina), these new high speed ports give up to 10 gb/s of transfer speed, which is double of the ExpressCard 2.0 slot. This gives the possibility of connecting high speed external harddrive, large high resolution screens and other devices that need high bandwidth for data transfer.
For me, the most exciting thing is the ability to use the eGPU standard on these machines, which would boost the speed of the laptop’s graphics performance by several fold.
There are only 2 current ThinkPad models to have Thunderbolt port, which are the:
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T430s with i7 and Integrated Intel GPU (the i7 Nvidia Optimus one doesn’t).
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Edge S430 with i7 and i5 discrete gpu model.
Personally, i wish more ThinkPads have Thunderbolt ports, and not just the mini Displayport. The Thunderbolt port gives user much more expansion option on their ThinkPads, which would make something like X1 Carbon or the ThinkPad Twist great.