How about Macbook Pro running Goobuntu?

Frowned upon for supportability reasons, even if you made it work with all the corp management stuff.

But like drbble said, laptops for engineers are mostly for Chrome, terminals, and NX/VNC sessions, since you can't code on them directly.

So they're exclusively thin clients presumably for security reasons? Is that the take away? Sorry if I'm being thick.

I wouldn't say they're exclusively thin clients; you can run more or less whatever apps you want (I use Omnifocus, Graffle, bunch of other stuff). But source code isn't allowed on laptop HDD's, so most engineers develop remotely on their workstations via SSH/remote-desktop.