The best part about ThinkPads is the refurbished market that'll get you modern dev machine that'll work for you like a horse for years for 300 usd.
This new modular thinkpad will be crazy for refurb market, I wonder how is Lenovo going to prevent that eating into their sales. This probably means that corporate bulk purchases are majority of their sales and they don't fear to canibalize themselves which makes you wonder why they switched to soldered ram - incredibly unpopular move - at all.