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I'm a Java dev and I know how I like java installed and its not the same as any distro.
Java tools installed out of the box would not be a plus for me.  I'd like the option in the repos but better to get a barebones box that you choose the tool you want installed.
I would install from the repo immediatly all the C and C++ tool set and kernel source but I'd like to tune the Java setup myself.
It would be cool to be able to apt-get ruby and get all you need to have a play with a new language ready setup, but my work has my requirements. So I need to be able to install work stuff (Java) myself.  I'd imagine other people in the same situation with ruby but would be happy to apt-get eclipse-java out of the box if thats not their core money earner.

As a Java dev we spend a lot of time compiling fast CPU and lot of RAM are needed.  A develeoper laptop is a tool not a toy so I'm prepared to spend some money on it.
But I totally agree with other comment that the box must cost less than the Windows version of the same spec PC.  If canonical want to offer/hard sella license deal cool with me, I'll probably buy into ubuntu one, but it should be an option.  I'll put up with handy tools (ahem adverts) for such things when I set the box up. But a markup for Linux is worse than the Windows tax. 

I would not buy a virtual Windows thing, we deploy on Linux and I never touch windows in my day job I use Firefox QA have to install IE, FE devs deal with that kind of problem.
But VM support is critical, I'm happy to develop on Ubuntu but we deploy to RHEL, VMs not working is a show stopper for me.

Screen real estate is important for developers we use every pixel, fluff is not needed, cool and clean is best. I've no objection to Unity, HUD is better than a menu bar taking up space IMHO provided the graphics are so fast its instant, but the most important thing is that the graphics work and at the end of the day the reason to buy a dev PC like this has to be that it takes zero effort to setup the graphics card and the USB3 or the webcam or whatever.  There is an overhead to setting up Linux on a laptop, I'd like to not have that setup overhead.

The Machine must come pretty bare with everything working.  The most annoying thing about developing on Linux is having to dedicate time you dont want to dedicate to getting some bit of hardware to work as it should. Linux is cool for its tweakability, I install Jack-audio and mess with the sound and break things ocasionally, that's my problem. Dell's should be that the microphone jack works out of the box with whatever Linux audio is in the base system.

If I break it its my bad, I dont need support, but its really annoying to have a PC that after you install the OS stuff still needs attention.  They key should be that you open the box and everthing works to start working the same day.  First days work is dev-env setup installing that eclipse 3.7.23.1234.beta6 with xxx patches. It should not be fiddling with drivers.

In summary

1. Fast PC, lots of RAM
2. Big screen
3. VM support
4. Bare bones but 100% working Linux OS, graphics especially must "just work", inc the external HDMI port!

Heres an Idea to keep everyone happy wiht regard to their OS preferences mentioned in the other ideas, unity is a moot point in the Linux community at the moment.

It would be really cool if the PC came with installed nothing on it yet but an installer,
You could pre-load some working distros.

When you first open the machine it said
Which OS would you like?
 Ubuntu Unity
 Ubuntu Gnome
 Kubuntu
 whatever...

Then installs the fully working Bare bones OS to the primary partition, deletes the unwanted distros, and do some disk partitioning magic to reclaim the space used from the unwanted distros.

 

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