Is this on the ribbon cable? Okay with a breakout board, this would be really interesting and offer something quite unique

It's actually open space right now in the market. It's an annoyance/limitation that the easiest current way to do i2c/gpio/etc hardware-y stuff involves moving to ARM/Rpi. There aren't any real easy solutions for x86 and hobbyists. I had a friend who worked in touchdesigner (which is x64 only) and it was always a bit annoying he couldn't hook say LED strips directly to his laptop and to touchdesigner (so people spend a small fortune on DMX lights). We ended up doing wifi + esps. But that's much more fragile..

Maybe ideally you'd have a header on the side of laptop kinda like the Rpi400?

But even a separate machine/baseboard would still be awesome in the hobby and education sphere