I actually want to applaud the thread starter for thinking of this. Compared to a poll that asks your favorite/best laptop brand, a poll that asks the worst will get far more attention & sincerity. The simple reason being that you more or less eliminate the problem of fanboys and marketing idiots.

Anyone trained to sell can hype up the good/unique/awesome/etc features that a particular brand of laptops have to offer. But it takes real analysis and/or experience for a person to find out the weak points. Hence my argument for sincerity.

As for the poll results, I'm not all that surprised that Acer is the worst, followed by HP and Apple. Acer has had a bad history of technical problems, and these things tend to stick, so suck it up Acer. I can't comment on HP because I've never used one. And Apple is really more of a specialized machine instead of the PCs most people prefer. (That being said, I personally know a guy who bought the new 17in MBP for Facebook.)

My final comment is this: You could remove the irrelevant brands from the list to get more meaningful data, eg. Toshiba, Fujitsu, Packard Bell.

Oh and I voted for Sony Vaio, because I think they're overpriced and overbloated Apple wanna-bes.