Ah, from what I gathered, there were two different problems. Firstly, a yellow cast over the entire screen, which is due to Apple's colour profile and can be calibrated out (like you said). Secondly, some reported the bottom third of their displays as having a yellow/dark cast, which cannot be calibrated out (unless there is a calibration profile that will like... gradient mask the screen).
I've been using Eye One for colour calibration (split the pricetag with a friend).
Yes, good point on the resolution. I'm at WSXGA 1680x1050 on a 15.4" right now and I think that's a perfect pixel density, and it's nice to have the same native resolution on both my laptop and external monitor. The WXGA+ 1440x900 on the Macbook Pro also looks good (OS X has a way of making a screen seem like it has more pixels...). The 1280x800 of the Macbook definitely feels slightly cramped... but not something I couldn't live with, I think. I used to do photo editing on an old 1024x768 IBM R40 after all.
How did we ever get by using 800x600 screens? I can't believe it...
Thanks for your input.