The "just works" aspect is extremely useful for non-expert users.
If a trend in the industry is towards limiting upgradeability, in the direction of rent-seeking by first subscriptions, soldering everything onto mainboard, limiting connections, later perhaps rental fee for equipment like it is with car leasing, a trend which I consider insane, can't I object to it? Chromebooks are basically a prime example of this trend, while regular notebooks didn't embrace it fully yet, but are getting there as well. Can't a company with arguably the best predictive platform in the world model and foresee the effect on environment, or is it just profit and mindshare that matters these days?
That said, I currently use a laptop that's seriously underpowered (by choice when I bought the thing ~7 years ago) with 4GB of RAM running Fedora and it does everything I need -- never once have I found I wasn't able to compile whatever random code I happen to be playing with at the moment. If ever I had to do serious dev work (like, it was my job) I'd need a better laptop but for the tinkering I do it works out just fine...though I did have to give up on Blender hacking a while back because of OpenGL versioning issues and I can't afford to buy a fancy new machine. That might not be an issue anymore, haven't checked on the OpenGL compatibility in quite a while TBH.
I actually used to hack on Blender with a 2GB netbook (also running Fedora) before I got my current "beast" so those things aren't completely worthless as you would suggest.
