I run on an VPR Matrix with a 1.8 ghz processor 512 RAM and a midrange graphics card. It hardly gives me problems however I find myself running my lappy out of virtual memory after a few hours of working with Maya and have to restart it. And (at least in my case) dynamic effects, such as the explosion tutorial on the AW site) will slow the system to a crawl when trying to run it with hardware texturing enabled.

I agree with everyone else that a laptop is okay to run Maya on.

P.S. I'm just so excited about this I have to tell everyone here. My friend has access to the High Performance Computing Center here at Texas Tech. If I remember correctly they have an SGI 2000 series server there just begging to be used by anyone. what makes it so appealing is that apparently they have Maya on it. He's talked to some people and their getting me sponsored so that I can have unlimited access to the supercomputer. Plus my friend has been doing CG work for about 4 years now and has offered to help me develope my modeling/animation skills. I'm so excited!