I've got one of HP's laptops with pretty much the same specs. Beautiful job and no slower editing and rendering with Vegas Pro 12 than my desktop with much higher specs.
No USB3 is a deal killer for me as well. I use tiny inexpensive buss powered USB3 for video projects all the time now. They are about the same as using an internal laptop drive and are plenty fast for editing compressed DSLR footage projects. No USB3, no sale to me.
I have this exact model laptop !!! While I have not tried Vegas on it yet, it runs Pro-Tools quite well (I'm an audio pro). I use a SIIG Express card to connect my audio interface via firewire. The Express card slot is right below the HDMI and one of the USB ports, so if you use an express card those ports might not be accessible. The i7-quad chip is zippy-fast. I uninstalled all the HP bloatware and killed all useless startup items. The 17" display is not super hi-res, but it looks good enough for me. Great deal !!!
Just got mine tonight from Tiger Direct. Has one USB3 port and 3 USB2 ports. Has a fingerprint reader. 631GB free on the HD (plus two partitions for recovery, etc). Awful default wallpaper (got rid of that fast). Blu-ray burner as promised. 1600x900 screen. No pixel problems. Model is discontinued; Tiger is selling what appears to be the most loaded version of this laptop. Quad-core i7. 8GB RAM. Win 7 Pro 64 bit. Don't like Windows 8 so that is fine here. So far so good.