I'd just like some suggestions, tips, struggles, the basics of Gimp and laptop! Is it a pain, or just takes time?

Just takes time. I use gimp on a laptop exclusively. No mouse, no tablet.

I've been in the same boat as Jellos up to Christmas, haha. If you don't know what ps is like... then I suppose GIMP is relatively nice and it usually works well for me. Once you learn the features and different combos of things you can do to get a certain effect similar the ones that you can get in ps with the click of a button, things start getting easier ;) But I'd agree with Jellos, time and patience is all it will take =)