Ok, obviously none of these people have an A8-based laptop because they're feeding you a bunch of conjecture. Jawny said his cousin has a hard time playing minecraft on his $900 laptop? Probably because it has Intel graphics. I personally have (and am typing on at the moment) an Acer Aspire 5560-Sb401:
http/shop.amd.com/ca/home/Detail/Notebook/ecx-Mem-ca-MX36491
This is as good a gaming machine as you can get for under $500. In fact, it beats several Intel offerings up to $1000 in gaming. I play Skyrim on medium setting with literally no choppiness or artifacts. The ATi Radeon HD 6620G on-die graphics processor has about the same power as a Radeon HD 6500M. If you want to see how well the A8 APU plays games, here's tomshardware's own review of the mobile A8:
http/www.tomshardware.com/reviews/a8-3500m-llano-apu,2959.html
You'll see that regardless of what all these "experts" are saying, the Llano mobile (Sabine) platform is designed specifically for budget gaming laptops and delivers incredible battery life (over 2 hours gaming). Intel's offerings at that price point all have the absurdly crappy Intel HD 3000 which literally gets its arse whipped by the Radeon HD 6620G in every situation. Read the review, it will make you conifdent you made the right choice. As for CPU power, the Llano cannot match Intel's offerings but let's face it, hardware is so far ahead of software these days. My Quad-Core Llano A8 feels very fast in every application I've ever used on my laptop and I'm sure that won't change because most people (like you and I) never do anything that requires the higher-level CPU power. We do however, often do things that take full advantage of the GPU (like HD movies, games, etc.) and this is where Llano really shines. Seriously, I've been using MS-Office and web browsers since the days of Win95 and the Pentium-1, do you really think that surfing the web and typical programs used by 99% of people have increased greatly in their hardware requirements since then? To be perfectly frank, AMD has changed the game with Llano making "budget" and "gaming laptop" no longer mutually exclusive. Trust me, you cannot go wrong with the laptop you listed.