Which Laura Ashley are you looking at? There are 3 of them.
I wish I had considered Brother more when I bought my machine.
I ended up with a Bernina 430E, and LOVE it. My second choice was the Horizon 7700, but it was another $1000 and didn't do embroidery. I would have loved the extra harp space, but that $1000 was just too much for me.
The NX2000 was the same price as the Bernina, but with the large harp space. For some reason, I got in my head if I was getting a larger machine I would get the Janome. I didn't even sew on the Brother
Now I regret it because it had SO many features that I have to pay big bucks to upgrade my Bernina to (a gajillion feet, circular sewing) and many things my machine can never do (multi-directional sewing, pivot function, thread cutter) It doesn't embroider, but the dealer was offering a free serger. I now wonder if I could have asked for a free cheap embroidery machine instead of the free serger. That would have solved the problem.
The Janome was REALLY nice. I mean REALLY nice. But just too far out of my price range (it was $3000, with a table)
So my thought: make sure you sew on all the machines you are considering. And don't let the gorgeous red color fool you into discarding another choice.
However, with every machine doing something slightly different, I think there is alway a little bit of "what if" that will remain.