Anytime you want to buy a computer, you should give a price limit. Because the best features on a laptop, most likely it is too expensive.
For everday operation and what is popular in stores nowadays, prices vary from brand to brand, store to store.
But definitely look for these specifications when shopping for laptop:
1) Interl Dual core 2 CPU. AMD chips tend to run hot.
2) screen size, and its resolution (1280 at least in my opinion). glossy or matte finish is really depending on your taste
3) RAM (at least 3gb)
4) Battery Life (2 hours is normal for a laptop), you will have to decide if you want battery power or CPU power. most likely you can't have both, not without paying a high premium.
5) Harddrive (at least 150GB), although it is nice to have as much harddrive as possible, nowdays portable harddrive are cheap, small and high capacity.
6) WiFi, this is usually standard. But make sure your laptop has this
7) USB ports. This is important IMO because you will often use USB ports on your laptop (mouse, printer, scanner, cameras, phone, etc..), so the more you have the better. Also check out the location of these USB ports. I prefer having it on both sides of the laptop, instead of crammed on one side, which will cause problems if you need to plug in two usb items together and one is shaped ackwardly.
8) Weight, if you are going to carry your laptop around frequently, then you might want to get a lighter laptop (more expensive, less power)
9) Operating system, most laptops now comes with windows Vista,
10) All others are relatively minor stuff, such as keyboard layout, the feel of the keys, heat, warrenty options, bluetooth, ...
If you use your laptop just for emailing, web browsing, video clips and some document processing (word, excel). then you don't need to spend more than $600-700 dollars. If you want to play the latest video games, work with graphics, you might have to spend around $1000.