other than the think pad recommendations, if you buy a laptop from almost any "mainstream" brand (lets say a company with a million sales or above a year), which is 2-3 years old, you will have a great experience. even 1 year is enough for like 90+% cases.
if you want to buy a chromebook, check https://docs.chrultrabook.com/docs/getting-started/prerequisites.html - only buy supported models.
in my experience, battery life has always been better than windows (but that requires some experience and knowledge about governors and other stuff, check tlp docs if you want to, and also buying mainstream intel/amd stuff (that has not a fancy architecture like hetrogenous cores))
not really. it is more of, "i am not really motivated enough right now, can you please motivate me a bit?"