Another G73 fan here. Started with 1 for my wife, borrowed it for multiboxing and decided I could drop my desktop, now own 3 of them. It has its quirks but after replacing thermal paste on the GPU, windows 7 SP1, new drivers, new BIOS, disabling the touchpad through BIOS and killing the touchpad software, and setting "ATI Graphics Power Settings" in all Windows Power profiles to Maximize Battery instead of Performance, it stopped crashing, losing USB, and dropping keystrokes. I have the version of G73 with the ATI 5870 rather than the NVIDIA chip.

I believe Best Buy raised the price on their version of the G73 by $100 when they switched to the NVIDIA chip, I seem to remember it being the same price as this Aspire is listed for.

The linked Aspire appears to be favoring HDD space rather than CPU/GPU power -- meaning to add a 2nd 640GB HDD and keep the price about the same, they probably gimped the GPU. What I would suggest is finding the same thing but with better CPU/GPU and less emphasis on the HDD. You can easily add a second HDD, but it's usually a pain in the ass to change the CPU or GPU. Besides, you can pick a nice SSD to put your games on for improved loading times.