If you don't need the synth, which is arguably a waste if you have the 7k sound generators available, you can save money by going for Edirol UA20 and UA3D which I also use. The a/d conversion is very clean, mic inputs are good and they are better than the chips in even the top of the range Toshiba multimedia laptops, which leave other laptops standing anyway. The UA20 is lower latency, the UA3D can pass 5.1 Dolby Digital for movie applications. Both give professional quality inputs and are cheaper than the synth versions, and have S/PDIF available for zero quality loss transfers to DAT or other portable hard drive recorders, and are simple plug and play via USB with no power required.

If you want output only and have a 32 bit cardbus slot I can recommend Echo Indigo which I use for streaming software synthesis. Asio latency is a low 7mS so B4, FM7, Halion and other software samplers play as in real time with no delay and greater quality than is available from any keyboard. It can drive the largest headphones quite adequately, which laptops cannot do generally and is a professional quality output of 24bit/96kHz. In combination with large headphones and a Dolby Digital virtual headphone DVD player they cannot be bettered, but the 7k makes a great monitor system too. It all depends what you want to do.