MBA or MBP setup

I have a 4yo Dell Studio 15 (Intel 2.1 ghz, 320gb, 4gb ram) that is on its way out, so I am considering a MBA or MBP. Although I ma most comfortable with windows, this dell has never run video very smoothly and crashes often. I know it's old, but for work, they gave out macbooks that were a few years old and ran video just fine and never crashed, even if it was a little slow. I also like that it works with so many other devices (ipad, apple tv) if I ever get those (however I do like my android phone since it integrates with gmail/gcal/maps so well)

I am a hobbyist photographer using LR3 and Picasa for photo management. I have 50,000 images but the majority of those are small jpeg files from point and shoots since I only picked up a DSLR last year. When I do shoot with my 5dii, it's in RAW so obviously those files are much bigger. Other than LR, I'm always on Chrome with 8-10 tabs open and use Itunes for playing music. Not many other programs are open.

For right now I like the laptop instead of desktop b/c i am usually surfing the web and blogging in the living room, so I need a keyboard. I do plan on getting an external monitor for heavy editing.

My question (finally) is this: for a hobbyist like me, what is a good setup for laptop and storage? the speed of SSD is attractive to me, but it also limits my absolute storage. Do I then use an external or local cloud storage such as time capsule or LaCie's cloudbox? Or do I go with a MBP with larger HDD and sacrifice the SSD? I don't need the RAW files after I've post-processed on my main machine, but I would like to back those up. I do like having the jpeg versions available to look through for various reasons. Portability is not a huge consideration since it will stay in the home and only ever so often leave if I go to a cafe, vacation, etc.  I do not feel like I need Retina unless you think I should. (b/c of the future external IPS monitor)

For argument's sake, let's say price is not an issue. What setup would you have? Anything I am missing or should be considering? Sorry for the long post.