I don't see the advantage, why would I pay the size / weight penalty? I don't use my machine long enough on battery in a single sitting to gain any benefit from extra batteries.

> universally better keyboards (at the very least, more robust!),

That is not an objective statement, its purely subjective.

> usually far cheaper for far better internals,

Not really, if you actually build a comparable machine the 'apple tax' doesn't even exist for many of their product, and is a couple hundred bucks for the rest. I spend a significant portion of my life on a computer, a couple hundred bucks means nothing. What you can do, and what usually happens when people do cost comparisons, is cheap out on some parts and come up with something considerably cheaper. That's fine, but it's no longer an apples to apples comparison and not a matter of Apple charging too much.

> ability to swap hardware out, before-market and after-market customization options...

Hardly anyone does this, even for desktops. I've been building my own PCs for ~20 years now. I remember the days of the 440BX chipset, when it came out you may have had a ~250Mhz cpu and 128MB of RAM, but just a couple years later you could toss a ~1Ghz PIII and multiple GB of ram it in cheaply. Thing is, that doesn't happen anymore. CPUs aren't advancing that fast and by the time you would want to upgrade the CPU there is a pretty good chance the new CPU requires a new chipset. RAM is also stagnant, we aren't seeing higher density or cheap prices (quite the opposite on prices actually, they have sky-rocketed). Point is, the last 3 PCs builds I've had are fully expandable and everything is swappable, yet the only component that has changed in any of them is the GPU. Expandability just isn't terribly important anymore.

There's a series: X, T, P, and A. I really hate when companies do this (I also think Apple does this a bit too much). "Powerful mobile workstations" or "Renowned professional tools" doesn't really help me narrow things down. Trying to seek these out in person, retail stores like Best Buy or the Microsoft store carry between 1 to 3 models total.

I never got the appeal of swappable batteries. I had multiple batteries about 10 years ago (mostly because one was EOL and I kept it around). Since it had to charge in the laptop I had to remember to swap it to keep both charged. I looked at external chargers; if it existed it was too much money (a few hundred dollars). This sort of workflow makes sense in a professional environment, like a photographer on set all day. That's what is done with camera batteries, but is too much of a pain for someone who just wants a bit of freedom from a desktop. I had a lot of skepticism when Apple dropped the removable battery; their swappable batteries lasted 5 hrs when new and had something like 200 cycles. The non-removable batteries had 6-8 hrs, went up to 1000 cycles, and were about the same cost to replace (and it was just a matter of unscrewing the case).

Even though I didn't like the new Mac keyboards as much as the old ones, I liked the Thinkpad's keyboard even less--which is a fairly subjective choice. The trackpads I found on every non-Mac laptop was objectively worse.

Connectivity: I really like that it charges with USB-C (I was quick to eliminate laptops with proprietary charging), but that's the only USB-C port. I never really found a laptop with 1 USB-A and a couple USB-C ports. At least for my use-case multiple USB-C ports and carrying an adapter works well for me now and I expect adapter use to decline over the life of use.

I was looking at the X1, which had memory soldered on. The laptops in the same "class" as the Macbook pro (size and weight), the PC versions used the same chipset and had similar compromises...which also meant the prices were fairly similar.

If, for example, you're looking for a chunkier and heavier laptop with swappable parts Apple doesn't make that laptop, but if general, if you like most of the concessions, similar models aren't that much cheaper and don't really offer that much more.