The change towards USB C for everything seems like a good long-term move to me. A magsafe adapter for charging would be perfect, but it's hardly a deal breaker for me. I don't mind buying a few adapters. Maybe I'm in the minority. If I'm already carrying around a backpack, what difference do a few adapters make? I'd probably only need an HDMI and USB adapter to interface with most peripherals anyway. When I'm outside of home or work, I don't even use any peripherals.
The 16GB RAM limit is fine for all my needs. My work laptop has 16GB and it can accommodate all my needs just fine. The only thing it falls short on is storage. I find myself having to clean up downloads semi-regularly.
With that being said, I think it's great that linux desktops are getting more love. I dislike the closed nature of macOS, and if I could pay to get an equivalent experience on an open system, I'd gladly do so. Thanks to Hacker News I learned about Elementary OS, which I'm gonna be trying out soon. Vala looks really interesting! I had never heard of it before, and I'm looking forward to having a free weekend to do a deep dive.