We were looking at some core i3 laptops, but they were all 15 inches, so we deemed them to be too heavy. In the end we've settled for a little 2.5 pound netbook, a amd fx dual core 1.2 gHz, which really limited what we can do.
The camera we have mounted is a logitech c310, so we're taking pictures at 1280x960. Unfortunately we're stuck with Windows because the drivers do not exist for linux and the generic driver makes the picture look kinda funky.
The software I wrote is unique from everything else I've seen or researched. I can't really talk about it because I'm looking to patent the algorithm in the near future. The processing framerate is pretty good, and certainly faster than the hardware will respond to. Unfortunately, my algorithm is currently written in Java because it was easier to interface with the camera that way
I'm sure if I did it in C or C++ everything would be much faster.