Im planning to buy a MacBook Pro 17" and Ive been looking at Amazon.co.uk and ebay.co.uk and also apple.com/uk

Ive noticed they generally range from £1599-£1899 for the 2.8 GHZ and £1399 for the 2.66 GHZ. I wouldn't mind getting the 2.66 or even 2.5 GHZ and spend the extra money on an SSD but i cant find those processors on Apple.com when i try and configure my machine.

Does this mean they are pre June 2009 models? If so, should i avoid them? Whats the difference?

The ones you cannot see on the Apple website, means they have been phased out.

I highly recommend getting the June 2009 model if you can afford it. The main reasons would be the battery life and better LCD. My 15" is able to last 6-7 hours on a single charge, this is will lower performance settings.
Secondly an SSD should be purchased separately, as they are normally cheaper and faster than the Apple option.

I tend to look at the OCZ Vertex, which has some pretty good firmware updates, which boost performance of the drive.
Another option would be getting the Intel SSD, but this one costs more than the OC Z.

I had been thinking of getting a MacBook Pro, but I found it too insulting to pay so much more $$$ for the parts that make up a Mac than where I could buy them elsewhere at a reasonable price (i.e., NewEgg). On another note, I couldn't believe Apple charges $1,000 for 4GB of additional RAM, but I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised about that.

As far as the suggestion to supply your own parts goes, I am not sure how good of an idea that would be. It is true that I haven't owned a Mac in a long time, but, from what I can recall, it takes very little "user mischief" to void an Apple warranty.

Right now, I am making do with a Hackintosh that is essentially a Mac Netbook with a Vertex SSD Hard Disk. While I must admit that I am quite impressed with speed, this SSD does seem to be subject to pervasive long-term performance deterioration that only seems to be remedied by formatting the drive and reinstalling the OS. I am also quite displeased that sound does not work (Realtek ALC269 High Definition Audio). Due to a strange glitch with Audieee, I cannot use the driver that was supposed to work, while other more drastic alternative attempts to get sound to work have resulted in me having to reinstall Leopard, something I would prefer to avoid in the future. Fortunately, I just found the right driver for the network card the other day, and that appears to have no compatibility problems with OS X, but we shall see...

Was planning on a Refurbished Alu Macbook , @ $1049 Can. Only glitch is no Firewire, for Audio use.
Don't like the plastic case Macbooks now that Alu is available.

Can't see much point in spending hours cooking a netbook , will it will suck for Audio apps and CPU power. The next generation Netbooks might get close.

Clock for clock, the 15" models will be slightly faster than their 17" brethren for some weird reason. So I'd personally go for an equivalent 15" model and upgrade the RAM somewhere else (Apple has always been ridiculous with RAM prices and it's stupidly easy to put them in).