The good news is, my laptop can run the Blender game engine at a decent framerate.
The bad news is I found out that is the Vista taskbar that more than halves it. I run without Aero, as Aero completely borks OpenGL (quite apart from the fact that Vista limits you to OpenGL 1.5). It's bothered me for a while that in Blender I could never get over about 30FPS - on the weekend I found out that I can have the window as large as I like and get much better framerates as long as the window doesn't touch the taskbar.
This is the kind of thing I hope SP1 will fix, but I severely doubt it :(