You probably saw this already, but NVidia has released updated drivers for the 160m chip that support CUDA:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro_nvs_notebook_winvista_179.28_beta.html

Unfortunately, if you try to install it on an E6500 with the 160m chip, the installer will tell you that there's no supported chip present on the system. Nvidia's site says Dell and Lenova are not supported (read: Nvidia left the device ID's out of the installer).

I am also frustrated by Dell's slowness here.

Unfortunately it's not even quite as easy as that.  Manually editing the INF to re-add the device ID which works with most NVIDIA devices, simply fails to work in this case as well.  The information I have recieved tells me that the Dell and Lenovo NVS 160m chips were specially modified and are not the same as the standard 160m chips found from other OEMs.  So, essentially the support we were expecting when we purchased this device is not their because we were all under the assumption that a NVS 160m was an NVS 160m regardless of the OEM.  Which obviously is not the case.

So we are stuck waiting to hope that maybe we will get the support pretty much everyone else already has access to.

I'm contemplating purchase of a Latitude E6500, partly to experiment with CUDA programming before investing more heavily.

I searched www.dell.com.au for CUDA and there are very few hits.  However there are currently 7 hits for drivers... see http://search.ap.dell.com/results.aspx?c=au&l=en&s=gen&cat=sup&k=cuda&rpp=12&p=1&subcat=dyd&rf=all&nk=f&ira=False&~srd=False&ipsys=False&advsrch=False ... and four of these seem to provide new drivers, including for the NVS 160M.

Since I don't have such an E6500 yet, I'd be keen to hear whether they work.