Yes, I have see the dumbass warranty offered, but can't remember where. That will probably be something to buy from the vendor, rather than the manufacturer. Definitely worth checking into.
As I said before, even the low end laptops of today will meet your needs - Celeron included. To prove my point, my current laptop is a three year old IBM Thinkpad i1480 with a Celeron 466, a 6 GB drive, and 320MB of memory and running Windows XP Home Edition. I can run a complete Oracle Database, Oracle development tools, a web server, and a web based Oracle application
simultaneously. It will play DVD's, but that has to be done by itself. Your computer will have a minimum of triple the speed of mine and, unless you're a computer programmer or doing digital video editing, the tasks you'll perform pale in comparison to what mine does.
You got it right with prioritizing other stuff ahead of the processor. Get the bigger screen, the DVD/CDRW and definitely the memory first.
I also wanted to mention another reason why I like IBM and Toshiba - they're great about replacing defective LCD screens. Other companies are more apt to make you live with a few bad pixels.
Finally, my favorite vendor is
CDW. They don't always have the very best prices, but the service is unbeatable.