The following is a list of the software I installed on the new MacBook Pro in the first 24 hours.
There are some tools (VirtualBox being a good example) that insist on installing themselves in the root application folder, and I am content to allow that to happen. It means my /Applications folder won’t be pristine, with only Apple provided applications, but it will be much cleaner than the hodge-podge of nearly 300 applications my old machine had collected.
In addition to these installs I also imported 8,652 pictures via FireWire from the PowerBook. I also imported 7,081 MP3 files to the new machine. I setup Mail to read my IMAP Gmail account, and I imported the latest Address Book backup, via Dropbox, to enable email and chat.
The new machine is amazingly fast and responsive - importing pictures from the digital camera was astonishing. The whole process was over in less time than it takes the PowerBook to recognize that a camera is attached and to prepare the import. It also synchronized my 30,000 or so email messages relatively quickly, having more than an 802.11b wireless card makes a huge difference.
There are still a couple of outlier programs to install, and some development tools to download, build, and install, but by and large the machine is ready for 95% of my daily use. Now I need to focus on the 50 GB of documents, spreadsheets and other data files on the PowerBook to determine what to migrate, and how to better organize it on the MacBook Pro.