"It can just take a while" is a pretty egregious understatement. As the busy beaver question shows, even an extremely simple turing machine with just a handful of states can execute for a completely unfathomable number of steps.
Noting this a few more states than a handful are possible. For example my laptop with bitpacking could track the visited or not visited flag for 64000000000 states without even using disk. Tracking a 33 bit FSM.
I agree though that linear bounded Turing machines having a solution for the halting problem is not actually that useful for real computers considering by the time a few registers had been iterated over the sun would have exploded.