I assume you're on XP 32 bit?
In my opinion yes, you are going to see a lot of difference in anything you upgrade to, even at the budget range you've described. My ultraportable which I bought in 2005 has a 1.8ghz Centrino (which I think is the same as the chip you described), and honestly I never even tried making music on it (I simply can't imagine trying).
When you say base units, do you mean desktop machine? If that's the case, YES you will no doubt get much more music-creation bang for the buck with a desktop machine, but for music makers (especially live performers) the portability is a nice thing to have. I don't gig live and don't need to move around, so I have a big heavy (but way powerful) desktop. If I sank the same money into a laptop I would have had a nice laptop but ultimately a much less powerful machine -- there's a price to portability. Even at the highend, the fastest laptops you can buy do not perform the same as the fastest desktop.
I would think that for your budget you could probably get an i5 class desktop, which is going to blow you away compared to what you're used to in terms of the plugins it can handle. I still put an emphasis on clock speed for music making over cores, but in my opinion you should still make sure you get 4 cores, because plugin makers are getting better at multi-threading.
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