Nah, they go in cycles. The Latitudes of about 3 years ago were pretty solid. Beefy hinges, fans, big case, etc. They slimmed them down and started using lighter plastics at some point in the last year or two (most easily seen in the much cheaper and more awkward release button) and will probably start bulking them back up fairly soon. However, Dell has never really been known for their laptops; they are sort of on top there by default since HP has publicly soiled itself over their reliability and IBM has stopped branding international machines.
The towers, on the other hand, tend to be very well designed. The generation of cases that they've been using on the business side has been very robust and is easy to work on, while the home/home-office lines have incorporated many of the key features. Flimsy, Dell systems are not (for the most part). Their faults lie in other areas, most notably the long-term reliability of their internal, lowest-common-denominator parts.
