I was running Maya on a Toshiba Satellite 2805-s402 (850MHz P3, GF2go) for a while. Performance was good except for some brutal slowdown with image planes. I suspect the slowdown was related to the paltry 16MB of video RAM on this system.
I was mostly doing modelling and animation, but nothing too heavy. After all, it only has 128MB of system RAM. This is sufficient for most of my needs, but Maya can eat up memory pretty quick (especially particles!).
The laptop does run hot, (it has a fan for the graphics chip) but I've had few problems. The battery was good for about 2 hours new, but as I ran it on AC so much it's down to about 20 minutes now. Properly running down the battery weekly may have helped with this. Also, it has occasionally locked up after suspending to disc (a power saving measure). The 15" screen is great at its native 1024x768 (only full screen at 1k). It's smaller than normal for Maya, but not objectionable. Colour looks good to me but I've read that some '24-bit LCD screens' can actually only display 18-bit colour. I can't see any difference, there's no banding.
Overall, I'm very happy with this machine. Its 18 months old now, so newer Satellites are probably that much better and probably run cooler. One caveat about the new models, 1600x1200 on a 15" screen will make all the fonts TINY. Try before you buy.
Hope that helps!
DougE