However for a server, the chance of a thief getting a disk and the HSM at the same time is low; and you really don't want to have to enter a password every boot. So the HSM design delivers some benefits worth having.
Whereas for a laptop, you can easily type in a password; and the chance of a thief snatching the disk and TPM at the same time is basically 100%. So there hasn't been a big push among Linux users to start using the TPM.
I also used the same software on my laptop to encrypt it. It's nothing fancy, just using the dm-crypt kernel module and any kind of hardware security module that talks PKCS#11 (which is all of them); On my laptop I just used my existing smartcard (which I used to login to the system and remote systems).
The disk header was just text occupying the first 4MiB of the disk in 2 circular buffers similar to LVM (though 2 copies for redundancy).