Unfortunately, a laptop is still a laptop. Small keyboard, inferior mouse (or lack thereof), single display, performance constrained by battery life. The performance margins are getting slimmer, but for a little over the price of the high end MacBook Pro (about $3000 with tax), I could build you a 64-core AMD G34 with 64 gigabytes of RAM, that would utterly destroy the Macbook performance-wise. Obviously, to each their own. I don't think the author is protein-folding or raytraycing, so this computer probably suits his needs better. Alternately, I could build a six-screen Beowulf cluster using 6 Nexus 7 tablets for $1200 (Tegra 3 performance is getting close to Core-Duo performance).
You're probably right about a couple of things here. First of all, Apple's products are notoriously expensive. I've once got myself a list of hardware in the Mac Pro and looked up the individual prices of the components. It added up to roughly half of what Apple charges you. For that sort of money you have a huge margin of what you can do to make things quicker.
Also, laptops are not performance computers. The idea of a "high-end gamer laptop" makes me shiver and every time somebody asks me which laptop to buy for high-end gaming I'll tell them "a desktop". The thing is though, that a proper laptop is good enough for doing a lot of work-related tasks and definitely good enough for consumer use.
People like their laptops because they can carry them around, use them wherever they want. And they know that the price for this mobility is worse performance. Most people don't care though. It's quick enough for most things they do, so there's no reason to care either.
Personally I like my laptop, it's got a near-fullsize keyboard, a whopping 18.4" display and I don't care about a mouse at all, so the touchpad doesn't bother me. It's quick enough for everything I do, large enough to be comfortable to work on but still at a size that makes it somewhat portable.
Now obviously, if you've got performance computing to do, stay away from laptops. For everything else, they're just fine.
Just priced it out on Newegg.com (see screenshot above) -- does not include shipping, power supply, etc...but gives you a general idea of the price range -- overall, you could probably do it for around $3.5k-$4k, or easily 3k if you dropped 2 processors, which would still be a beast of a machine...
Well, HN isn't "the internet", it has its own traditions. I didn't down vote you, but, if I vehemently disagree with you, I'll certainly do so, regardless of how thoughtful and considerate your comment is. Likewise, if I see something in the grey that I agree with, I'll go out of my way to upvote it back to at least neutral.
In general, the vast majority of comments on HN fall within the bounds of good taste, so consider ones aggregate karma as a reflection of what the community here assesses the validity of your contribution as.
