The Wife asked me to help her choose a new laptop - Its got a few functions to fill from allowing the 4yr old to play the odd game , to general browing / MS Office kind of stuff.

just to throw a curve ball in , I plan on stealing it from time to time when I travel - my work laptop weighs a lot and if I only need something to present with / note take then it would be handy to have something a little smaller.

Touchscreen woudl be good - especially with windows 8
If possible an internal Optical drive ( I know this rules out many "ultrabooks" )
Plenty of battery life
4gb of RAM shoudl be sufficient.
SSD Ideally.
Good Screen Res.
Pretty light. ( my current rig weight in at 3Kg with PSU )

It seems the Haswell chips are pretty few and far between at the moment in the laptop world - is it worth waiting for them ?