The comparison is between something you can buy off the shelf like a powerful Mac, vs something powered by a Grace Hopper CPU from Nvidia, which would require both lots of money and a business relationship.
Honestly, people pay $4k for nice TVs, refrigerators and even couches, and those are not professional tools by any stretch. If LLMs needed a $50k Mac Pro with maxed out everything, that might be different. But anything that's a laptop is definitely regular consumer hardware.
If I'm running a software business selling software that runs on 'consumer hardware' the more people can run my software, the more people can pay me. For me, the term means the hardware used by a typical-ish consumer. I'll check the Steam hardware survey, find the 75th-percentile gamer has 8 cores, 32GB RAM, 12GB VRAM - and I'd better make sure my software works on a machine like that.
On the other hand, 'consumer hardware' could also be used to simply mean hardware available off-the-shelf from retailers who sell to consumers. By this definition, 128GB of RAM is 'consumer hardware' even if it only counts as 0.5% in Steam's hardware survey.
Today, lots of people spend far more than that for gaming PCs. An Alienware R16 (unquestionably a consumer PC) with 64 GB of RAM starts at $4700.
It is an expensive computer, but the best mainstream computers at any particular time have always cost between $2500 and $5000.
