We discuss various aspects of inclusive top-quark pair production based onTOPIXS, a new, flexible program that computes the production cross section atthe Tevatron and LHC at next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy in softand Coulomb resummation, including bound-state effects and the completenext-to-next-to-leading order result in the q-qbar channel, which has recentlybecome available. We present the calculation of the top-pair cross section inpp collisions at 8 TeV centre-of-mass energy, as well as the cross sections forhypothetical heavy quarks in extensions of the standard model. The dependenceon the parton distribution input is studied. Further we investigate the impactof LHC top cross section measurements at sqrt(s)=7 TeV on global fits of thegluon distribution using the NNPDF re-weighting method.