All of the enclosure design files will be published on the Wiki shortly, so you'll be able to make your own. The desktop/laptop versions ship with a spare bezel, as well, so you have one to modify. You could happily make your own case or pay a fabricator to do so, but the case in the campaign is injection molded, so you'd likely pay a lot more to do so.

The focus of this laptop is really on versatile and hardware-hacking-power, not on raw performance. There are a number of flagship features that you won't find in a typical laptop, and gobs of expandability.

For example, there's an onboard FPGA, for when you're at the coffee shop and you need to MITM a high-speed / low-latency protocol.

The schematics are full of attention to detail and fantastic surprises: http://www.kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=Novena_PVT_Design_So...

As you've pointed out, it seems like a big price jump to go from the bare board to the desktop and from the desktop to the laptop, but you're actually getting a lot of components there, including: very flexible battery charge controller (runs ChibiOS on an ARM7), speakers, speaker mounts, machined SSD mounting rails, and cabling. The screen is a gorgeous IPS panel.

Also, regarding the airplane tray table: it's actually designed to be hung off the seat in front of you, so you've got the entire table free.