How easy is it to do the course on my own hardware rather than cloud notebooks? Would that make it closer to practical deployment?
Most practical deployment is done to cloud environments rather than local notebooks. The deployment exercise we do in the course is designed to show the key components you'll need for deploying simple models in practice.
Re the course, I just skimmed it and I think you can do most things on your own hardware but if you will actually use this for something practical (not just for you or a side project), being familiar with cloud tools is a big thing especially once you scale.
I disagree with needing none and just going along as needed. That’s how you have machine learning models that look like they work but you don’t understand why they work so there might actually be problems.