When you hot-swap a VGA cable you generally won't have a visible display if you switch to a monitor that can't handle the resolution you were just outputting to the previous monitor. Unless things have changed in this respect, hot-swapping only worked perfectly (resolution didn't matter) with digital connections, at least on ATI Mac hardware. I can't speak for the Windows drivers and firmware.

The rest, HDCP and single/dual link aren't concerns for most people out there. Dual link only matters if you're trying to drive a dual-link display. HDCP is only going to matter when you're playing back protected content on a platform that implements the protection.

VGA also doesn't look as good and for me that's more than a little big important. Every Mac can output to VGA from its DVI-I connector with a dongle if necessary. I'm assuming any clone notebooks offering only a DVI port offer the same capabilities, no?

I like to have at least one system around with legacy ports, but I don't want a notebook with a serial port nor parallel port on it either. I wouldn't mind it if Apple would have kept the S-Video port on their notebooks though, since it allowed using two external displays and turning off the built-in. Now you're limited to using the notebook's own display if you want to connect to an NTSC/PAL monitor at the same time.