What GPL zealot freedom is gained on this thing over taking an ordinary reference-design Intel chipset business class laptop (such as from ASUS or MSI) and installing pure debian or arch on it, and never enabling a non-free repo?
OP wasn't rejecting the basic philosophical underpinnings of the Librem project, but merely noted the inconsistency with which they applied those principles.
Librem could have developed a pure FOSS machine if they'd chosen to do so. However, it'd have a RISK-V based chip and a bunch of other exotic components that would have rendered impractical for regular use.
Instead, Librem took the pragmatic route and chose to adopt a number of proprietary components including an Intel CPU. Despite this, they chose to bypass Intel when choosing a WiFi chip at the cost of being unable to support modern WiFi standards.
It doesn't really make a lot of sense.
Not sure what you mean. Are you aware of any other WiFi adapters supporting free firmware?
If you don't care about that, that's ok you are in majority, but not target audience of this product.
If I still cared about laptops/notebooks I would be interested in this precisely because of it.
And sure intel (and AMD) need to have binary blobs for their cpus. Which obviously is not good. But if nobody even tries and works toward this goal, nothing will ever get done.
I doubt we will ever see x86 fully open computer. But now that Apple have led the way with M1, in 3-6 years when the rest of the industry catches up, there is at least chance of librem and others building a decent binary blob free laptop.
But you need to start somewhere.