MOTUnation.com

I am thinking of ditching my old Mac Pro Tower (2x2.6 Quad Core) which runs DP8 reasonably well, but stalls a little with a number of virtual instruments. I need portability more, so considering a 15" MacBook Pro, 1TB, Turbo Boost to 3.8GHz, with 16 GB ram, adding a cinema screen when needed. Does anyone have experience of running this laptop? Will it do most DP tasks well with the i7 and limited ram?

I need advice and reassurance that I needn't really aim to get a Mac Pro or boosted iMac.

Also, I use a Firewire Motu 828. Has anyone run this well using a thunderbolt/firewire adaptor?

As long as that 1TB is an SSD (which i assume it must be), then that should be a great machine. 16GB should be more than enough for all but the biggest templates given the fast drive.
Depending on how many VIs you own, you might at some point feel a little cramped if you're limited to the internal drive only, but you can always keep TBolt externals next to your cinema screen, and you can have a "laptop" set of instruments that cover all your compositional bases without employing multi-gigabyte versions of those same instruments.
MOTU 828 via TB adapter I can't specifically address, but most interfaces work fine through Apple's TB/FW adapters as a rule.

Now: having said all this, if portability is not an urgent issue, you might be able to get a lot more life out of your tower merely by adding SSDs for your samples, as that's almost certainly a bottleneck. Plus the nice thing about doing so is there's nothing lost; you can take them with you via thunderbolt whenever you move on to a new cpu.

Also, I use a Firewire Motu 828. Has anyone run this well using a thunderbolt/firewire adaptor?

Yes. There's a recent thread on this but I can't find it.