I'll be the voice of caution for ASUS. Some of their products are pretty okay. I've got an ASUS mobo in my build, actually. But their customer service is so bad as to be borderline illegal. I don't give them my money, and I now consider it my duty to at least warn other people away from dealing with them. The reason I hate them is that I purchased a brand new Nexus 7 (which they manufacture, and, at least theoretically, warranty). Unfortunately, it bricked within 8 months. I spent the next 4 months and 1 day fighting (unsuccessfully) to get them to honor their warranty and repair it. They first tried to claim that I had dropped it in water, even though I had done no such thing. Then they jerked me around for literally months, coming up with one excuse after another about how it wasn't their fault. By the time they finally issued me an RMA, they had managed to push the process out until a year past purchase date (even though more than 1/3 of that time was spent trying to get them to honor their warranty), and then refused to repair it without me paying nearly the entire cost of the tablet again, because it was "out of warranty," even though I could, and DID, prove that I had contacted them and requested service WELL before the warranty end date.
Moral of the story, for me, is avoid ASUS like the plague. I'd also recommend that you avoid Toshiba. I used to really like them, but wherever they're sourcing their parts now has horrible QC, and the last 3 I purchased before giving up on them all failed within 2 years in catastrophic ways (HDD fail, motherboard fail, and on the first one I had, which was the best one, the USB ports stopped working, and the battery won't charge, even with a new one. It's only a matter of time on that one).
Whatever you DO go for, make sure it's got good, reliable parts, and that if you have a smartphone, tablet, etc, that you match systems. Makes things easier. If you're an iPhone user, I'd recommend getting a Mac. If you're Android, get a PC. For gaming, you'll probably want at least a Core i5 or i7 processor, or the comparable AMD processor. I'm running an AMD Phenom quad-core, which, while slower than the i5, does fine at a lower price point. AMD is cheaper, Intel is, at least right now, better. You'll obviously need wireless networking, but pretty much everything should come with that. I'd want at least 8 GB of RAM, personally. Hard drive space may be a thing. I wouldn't want less than a TB. My current build is 4.5 TB, and I plan on swapping one of the drives for a 4 or 5 TB one to double that. But, I have a lot of media stored. Games have gotten a lot bigger since I was in college. Personally, I'd ditch the optical drive and have two hard-drives installed, if I went the laptop route again. I like to have the OS installed on a solid state drive (which will make it run MUCH faster, for one thing), and store most to all of my data on a large standard hard drive. The advantage is that, when a virus bricks your computer and forces you to reinstall windows or reimage your machine, which DOES happen, you don't lose everything, because it typically attacks just the C drive with the OS. Since the OS is the only thing on that hard drive, I can reinstall windows without losing any data. On the rare circumstances I'd actually need the optical drive, you can get an external USB one for relatively cheap.
Anyways, that's a few thoughts. You may want Bluetooth. I use bluetooth pretty extensively. You also want to invest in a good bag to carry it in. Also a USB wireless mouse is probably a good idea, if you're gonna be gaming.
