well, it depends on application, today, many graphics intensive programs like photoshop, 3dsmax and cad programs all have hardware acceleration, which is basically offloading tasks that would normally be performed by CPU to GPU. In that regard, depending on how big your projects will be you might benefit from a dedicated card more than from extended RAM. From my experience on this forum and a few friends, the trend seems to be that for graphics development and such designers/developers welcome entry level gaming models because they are still relatively cheap, so you are not overpaying for game performance that you obviously don't need, but they do provide good performance boost over typical consumer models that would be of the same price due to "other features" that do not add to performance.
In case you think you don't need a dedicated card, (I still think, llano would be a good choice for your application, since it's got a bit more graphics juice than typical intel integrated chipsets), here's a few options with better processors:
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Acer 15.6" - i5 + 6Gb ram + 640 Gb HDD ~$600
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Asus 15.6" - i5 +6Gb ram + 640 Gb HDD ~$630 (if you don't like the first design)
Both will get the same performance, only reason asus is more expensive is that the ram is faster (1333mhz vs 1033mhz on acer), but difference won't be noticeable.
unfortunately newegg doesn't have anything with i5+8gb ram in $500-700 range, but if you go to other websites you might find something. Also, not that newegg is bad or anything but don't limit your search to only one website. Go to company website directly, they might have some sales going on. Check out websites like www.dealstudio.com
and always try to find a few review for a laptop before buying, from some long standing websites like pcmag, notebookcheck or notebookreview