I don't care about portable. How often do I want to use a computer to make something somewhere that's not the office or at home? Never, in my experience.

"Well, you can hook it up like it's a desktop."

The laptop may be portable, but the monitors and peripherals definitely aren't. That setup isn't portable, only the laptop part of it. In the event that I hook it up like a desktop, I'm paying more for the privilege of having an under-powered desktop running whatever god-awful driver collection goes along with it's cruddy components and not infrequently pre-loaded with a bunch of bloatware as part of the install that has those drivers (often hard to find otherwise.)

For me, the desktop is the clear preference. If I want portable, I'm just consuming content - a tablet will do fine for that.