Seconded.

Other downsides to laptops:

- Laptops are easier to steal and fence. Someone breaking into your house would think twice about hauling away a full size desktop PC case, but a laptop is a no-brainer.

- No way to upgrade the video card in most laptops. Probably not an issue for Doug since he's not playing any of the really modern video games, so any laptop with a high-end video chip would meet Doug's needs. But that particular issue always gives me pause. Even though I personally am using a very old desktop computer that still uses an AGP slot for its graphics card, I was recently able to upgrade the card that was in that slot. (The card was still an old AGP card, but it was more powerful than its predecessor.) Can't do that with a laptop.

- Many new laptops do not come with CD/DVD drives at all. An external CD/DVD drive is often an additional purchase. Need to install old software from CD-ROMs?

- Newer laptops are becoming less and less compatible with legacy hardware. You won't find an RS-232 serial port on any laptops these days (ever want to do an Empeg drive upgrade again?), and even things like Ethernet ports or even FireWire ports are starting to get scarce. And the PS/2 keyboard port thing was already mentioned. Of course, all of those things can be worked around pretty easily, but they all involve buying additional hardware or a docking station.

- Overall, laptop makres are making all of their design choices based on portability, low weight, and low power consumption, and in many cases those design choices will compromise the speed and upgradeability/maintainability of the system. They've made great strides towards making laptops much more powerful and capable, and most people (Doug probably included) would find a new laptop to be lightning-fast and more than adequate for his needs. But it's something to keep in mind.

With all of that said, I'm still seriously weighing whether or not I want my next personal PC purchase to be a laptop, possibly even an Apple one. I know the trade-offs, and Apple has made fantastic choices in those areas. I haven't been doing a lot of high-end gaming on my PC lately (Kerbal Space Program isn't really high-end), so the video card upgradeability isn't as much of an issue for me as it used to be. The ability to boot into Windows (or to run a Windows VM) on an Apple laptop would give me the best of both worlds. I'd need to jump through some hoops to get certain things working (such as the FireWire audio interface I recently bought), but once I did, I think I'd be pretty happy.