Not necessarily. My budget is pretty finely calibrated at the moment - my desktop is going to remain pretty broken for a while so that I can get a new laptop.
In which dystopia does it cost you $1000's to fly locally, as many would do? I can cross my goddamn continent for $600 return and that's over 4000km away. Going interstate costs $200 return on a good day.
Sure, but the marginal utility of a given flight is far higher than the marginal utility of a second computer. Moreover, I may be paying for my computer but my company may be paying for my flights.
A desktop does nothing more than marginally better for my work use cases; I have one that's literally strictly for video games, and I don't care in the least about making those portable. But I care about going to my client's office and being able to work. Why would a desktop be "better"? If a desktop was sufficiently "better", why would I buy a good laptop? If I have to buy a good laptop, what delta exists, for me, to incentivize buying a good desktop as well? This is of course not an answerable question for you, because you have no idea what I or the literally hundreds of millions of people on this planet who own laptops do with our computers--so why did you then act like your preferences are so universal?
Past that: it costs me three hundred dollars, round-trip, to fly from Logan to Reagan. Where does "thousands" come into it? Why would somebody who occasionally fly for business necessarily have the cash to burn on redundancies? Why would having that money imply that one should?
Laptops do not make desktops redundant. You will not be able to strap on a 6" tower H/S or better to cool down the highest performance processors, let alone be able to pack a battery to run said processor and a HP GPU into any laptop form factor.
It is true that not every work load needs such a capable machine and you should only spend as much as you need.
That being said, I was working with a friend on a recent project and he told me that his MacBook was "burning up" while running through a build script that put together a a handful of Docker containers. My ~5 y/o Desktop barely even hiccuped on the same thing.
I would have thought, given the thrust of my post, that the "for me" with regards to redundancies was completely and wholly implied, no? Of course desktops can do things laptops can't; I've been careful to say nothing at all to the contrary and that's fortunate because that would be a stupid statement. And laptops can do things that desktops can't, too, and whether or not that matters depends wholly on you and your needs. Which is why the sneering you-don't-need-that of the post I originally replied to rustled my jimmies in the first place.
