Sager.

Same brand as the one I'm currently posting on which has lasted me over 5 years so far.

My only apprehension is that I feel not too long from now 8GB RAM will not be much.

If I were to upgrade to an i7 processor I get it loaded with up to 32 GB RAM. From what I've read there isn't much difference between the i7 and i5 for gaming. The comparable speed of an i7 would be an additional $250. I'm trying to keep it under $1200. But if you know the additional cost is worth it then ill take it into consideration.

500GB HD is fine for my purposes. I figure by the time I need additional room a SSD may be cost effective.

8gb of ram for the i5, which is still good plus it can be upgraded. Now to note on your SSD comment, whether it's limited it or not the performance increase in games is phenomenal in terms of loading speed etc... Just search YouTube SSD vs HD you'll see. There are many beneficial factors of SSD but also as with all good comes bad. Such as price for example they're considerably more but I think the good outweighs the bad. It's lighter in weight, many people think this isn't a real benefit but since you're using a laptop and you would carry it around it will be for you., shockproof (if you drop it, it won't damage the drive as it would on a HD) and of course the biggest benefit of all is overall speed improvement from boot times to application loading times you will notice the difference. It all boils down to loading times really that determine the benefits of SSD for gaming. My personal opinion is they're fantastic, The only downside is the small capacity. But that's why I have an extra 2 tb storage HD's. Although another option you could look into is a hybrid drive it's like storage of HD but speed of SSD. I can't think of a brand from the top of my head but a quick search on google will put you on the right track.

From the description you give, it's a very nice laptop. If you can afford the i7 go for that. 

No offense, but that "10,000 writes" number above is not current-maybe that's what SSDs were 5 years ago (I haven't been following them THAT long).  Certainly it was before TRIM support.  If you look at a modern SSD on Newegg (say the 128GB Crucial M4), its MTBF is 1.2 million hours.  Even using a marginal quantity of that admittedly misleading stat, it's easy to see that it should definitely last you at least a few years.

The other thing of note is that SSDs don't fail the same way that HDDs do-any cells that fail just become read-only, and you're likely to notice a performance decrease well before that happens.  The point being, you could likely still boot the drive.

If you do get an SSD, get one from Newegg and install it yourself.  Same goes for upgrading the RAM.

I can't imagine choosing an i5 over an i7, personally.  Games and applications are only going to become increasingly more multi-core aware, and you really won't notice the drop from 2.5GHZ to 2.3GHZ (3610QM).  In fact, the 3xxx series (Ivy Bridge) reach a higher turbo speed, so it's likely to be faster even for instances where all cores aren't utilized.

Normally I'd suggest the 7970M over the 670M, but as it would put you over budget and the games you've listed aren't ridiculously demanding, I'm tempted to go in the other direction and recommend that you have a look at the 650M in the W110ER.  Unless you intend to game at 1920x1080 with eye candy turned all the way up, this is probably more than sufficient, and even then it's really only the DDR3 memory on the W110ER's version of the card that will limit it.  Speaking of which, if you want a higher resolution you'll have no choice but to hook up an external monitor to it.  For some, this defeats the point of having a laptop-but not for others.

Go ahead and upgrade to the 750GB HDD for $20 on xoticpc and you're looking at about $980.  I suppose you could instead do the W150ER with a GDDR5 650M (basically a 660M) for $1100ish, with the screen upgrade.

One last thing: Windows 7 Home Premium only sees up to 16GB of RAM.  In order for you to (ever) go higher than that, you'll need Professional or better.  But this is a non-issue with the W-series as they only have 2 DIMM slots.