I don't know about the quality difference between Gateway and Toshiba. My last two notebooks were both Toshibas...I bought one for myself and one for my wife. I now have a gateway 7426gx.
Both Toshibas were good, solid machines, but both had weird problems. The trackpoint on mine would go crazy after boot for about two minutes with the arrow drifting towards one side of the screen or another no matter what you did, then it went away. The floppy drive died, but that wasn't a concern.
My wife's had a lot of weird blue screens of death when we tried to use a wireless PCMCIA card and was generaly very quirky...sometimes it would recover from standby, sometimes it wouldn't. Mine started to have a problem with video, where the screen would go very dim (back light dead) but then would come back and wouldn't trouble me again for weeks. Eventually (three years), mine died completely...won't boot, no activity, nothing. My wife's is still working, but it's not very reliable and some of the keys no longer work (not a dirt issue). I have an NEC laptop I bought in 1998 that still runs perfectly, so 3 years of life really sucks.
Neither of the Toshiba's had any dead pixels, which is good, but both had weird bright areas of the screen that looked as though a beam of sunlight struck them.
An older woman I know bought one of those big 17" Toshibas last year and it's falling apart...the touch pad buttons are loose, the touch bad is quirky and keys are sloppy (although other than that it's fine).
My Gateway, on the other hand, is perfect. Not a single flaw of any kind. I've only had it about 8 months or so, but that was all the time it took to notice the flaws in the Toshibas. Not to mention that you cannot return a Toshiba to Best Buy for one dead pixel (returns are based on manufacturer policy) but you can return a gateway for the same reason.
If you ask me, Gateway (eMachines) makes higher quality laptops than Toshiba.