> I think a lot of people would be better off buying a fast workstation and a very cheap laptop[...]

This!

I'm currently in a hotel room using a cheap laptop (5-year old Lenovo 330) to connect remotely to my fast workstation (home-built Ryzen, lots of memory, lots of storage and LTO6 tape for backups). There's almost 1000mi between them but that's not stopping me doing anything I require. If someone steals the laptop, no big deal, buy another one. All I do is sign and and connect to remote stuff, pretty much nothing of value is stored locally.

"My home [PC] is my cloud", as Sir Edward Coke didn't quite say...