[pluma]

Laptops and docking stations. And why shouldn't they replace desktops? Miniaturization is an almost universal trend in technology. The only place it doesn't work is screens, which is why we see a convergence in screen sizes between smartphones and tablets (although some devices are trying to replace the screen as a visual UI to varying degrees of success).

[VLM]

laptops also equal VPN access and work-from-home.

Depending how cheap your employer is you may not get both a desktop and a laptop. I had no desktop from 00 to 05 so that some beancounter could get a bonus for not "wasting" a tiny fraction of our total salary on giving my team both a laptop and a desktop. I don't miss that place, but most of the world works under conditions like that.

So desktops are for people who absolutely cannot ever be imagined to work from home, for practical or primate dominance reasons. That's a rapidly shrinking segment of the employment population.

Ironically by plugging a large display and decent mechanical keyboard into a "laptop" we're just reimplementing desktops the hard and expensive way.

[pluma]

I'd say you need to distinguish between "laptop" and "laptop with docking station" (or just lots of cables).

I mostly work on my laptop wherever I am -- in office, at a client, at home, on the commute, at user groups, etc. I'm comfortable with using my laptop's keyboard although I do enjoy having additional external screens when they are available.

But I know plenty of people (including non-developers at non-tech companies) who do most of their work at their desk with the laptop plugged into a docking station with external peripherals -- keyboard, mouse and screens -- and only use the laptop on its own for meetings or as part of a BYOD policy.

Desktops are non-portable. Laptops are portable. Tablets are ultra-portable but 1) not powerful enough on their own (good luck relying on a remote desktop with a dodgy Internet connection) and 2) not as comfortable to use for many professions (due to size constraints, even if you have a physical keyboard -- less so if you just need a dumb device to click through PowerPoint presentations).

Laptops are a compromise between a desktop and a tablet. Laptops with docking stations can replace most desktops (except for high performance scenarios -- but for reference my 15.4" laptop has 4 cores, 32 gigs of RAM and an nVidia graphics card; good enough for most things other than bleeding edge AAA gaming).

The benefit of a laptop with docking station over a desktop is portability. Desktops are only really required if you need levels of performance you absolutely can not gain with a laptop or that would make the laptop insufficiently portable (e.g. due to battery life -- I can generally get away with a meagre three hours away from wall outlets but many would prefer a longer battery life over the raw performance).