The laptop I chose to purchase is the MSI GT63 Titan-047. It was between that an the Alienware 15, which both best met the requirements I described in my original post. The only clear differences were the manufacturer, and that the Alienware was priced at $1950 (from Dell's site) and the MSI at $2100 (from Amazon).
As of this writing (and, I believe, until September 30), the MSI is available for $2200 - $150 mail-in rebate from Newegg. That makes the price difference just $100.
Two factors made me choose the MSI over the Alienware: First, my current laptop is an MSI, and I didn't even consider looking at replacements until more than five years after purchase. Second, Newegg's return policy explicitly mentions installing additional operating systems being accepted, as long as the recovery partition is retained (you should check their wording before relying on my account, though).
So I bought the MSI from Newegg. It arrived Thursday (today is Saturday), and I am loving it so far. Being so new, it's got a couple glitches under Ubuntu, but nothing serious. My main (unstated) requirement was that it could run Fallout 4 at top settings, and it is managing that with flying colors. The screen is beautiful and smooth, the keyboard is a delight to type on (although MSI is still doing that obnoxious thing where they put the Home and End keys both out of reach, and require Fn-activation for them), and the trackpad supports my desired scrolling and tapping (although Windows is scrolling in reverse, and does not seem to provide an option to fix it).
I wholeheartedly recommend the MSI GT63 Titan 047 (Amazon link).
And if you have trouble with your WiFi under Linux, try this:
git clone https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/iwlwifi/backport-iwlwifi.git
cd backport-iwlwifi
make
sudo make install
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