I definitely need a minimum of a 2500 but prefer a 3000!
Are you rating them by the model number or something?? Because i thought that an a1200 was better than an a2500 in pretty much any way. A towerized a1200 is pretty comparable to an a1200 and have loads of expansion cards like powerpc, graphics cards and so on which will enable you to use OS4 once it has been released.
I believe the a1200 is the only one that run OS4 beta so far.