The allure of quasi-portability is real. I was a college freshman when the Mac Cube came out, and I bought one with an Apple LCD display so that I could (1) have a computer that I could bring home in my carry-on luggage, and (2) not have to settle for the G3 processors in the 2000-era PowerBooks.
Agreed, I’m literally traveling with my NUC right now. Though I know my MBP has a faster processor than the NUC with i5 processor, the latter is just more stable in many ways. (And that means still sometimes I’m using MBP as the processing unit and ssh onto it to run tasks)