Well for actual specs I believe MSI has the highest specs/performance for the price with the GE-40 variant that has a 675m 128gb ssd + 750gb 7200rpm hd clocking in around 1,300 bucks. The availability of the SSD and a HD is what makes me choose this one.
I have been looking in the same range of laptops and every one has something that makes me not want it.
Razer is just too expensive and it's screen is borderline terrible based off of reviews at Anandtech
Lenovo is a great value, poor quality screen and only a 750m card (not terrible). No SSD either at the 850ish price range and the storage expansion is limited to M.2 drives which aren't readily available in the market as of yet.
Alienware is pretty solid but again you pay the boutique bonus.
Long story short there is no "great" 14 inch laptops out there that checks all of the boxes.
You either get great performance with a terrible screen.
Great screen, decent performance but sloooow hdd which just ruins a laptop for me personally.
If a company can come out with a laptop in the 1200-1400 range that has a nice IPS display, a ssd and a 7200 hdd with at least a 660m I think it would rule this market.
On a side note if you do not care about HDD speed and don't mind jumping up to 15.6" there is a nice Asus laptop that I actually bought and tried out, the Q550LF (http

/www.bestbuy.com/site/Asus+-+15.6%26%2334%3B+Touch-Screen+Laptop+-+8GB+Memory+-+1TB+Hard+Drive+-+Black/8937158.p?id=1218954926513&skuId=8937158). This had a decent graphics card, a BEAUTIFUL IPS Full HD screen, backlit keyboard. It just had a crappy 5400 RPM hard drive and no expansion slots for an SSD to be added so the only option would be completely replace the drive and that just makes you have to add another 150-200 bucks for a decent SSD and drives up into the GE40's range, of course the screen is way better than the GE40's but like I said no perfect solution laptop out there.
Could look into Clevo based custom laptops too, can get decent specs from sager or xoticpc