At your desk you have some mini docking station that powers your laptop and connects it to monitors, wired mice, the Wacom tablet, the network, the thumb drive, speakers, cameras, mobile phones and everything else.
Then, on the road or at home you just have the one dongle that you plug normal USB stuff, the ethernet and maybe an SD card into. You power the computer with the adaptor it came with and not the docking station.
In this new future there is one or maybe two leads connecting the computer to stuff. It does not have a forest of leads sprouting out of every side except the front, everything is neat and less likely to break. I am not an Apple fan and I prefer mini USB to whatever it is those Apple things have. However I think Apple are right to sort the ports out properly.
The other oft-quoted problem with the new Apple machines is the max memory, I feel that some explanation is needed for that as quite a few Intel high end low power CPUs are limited to 16Gb RAM, as are their own NUC computers. So there is nothing sinister going on here, it is just a choice of low power/battery life/cooling that Intel have forced on their customers where the compromise is the 16Gb max RAM.
But, besides having a singular environment, a dock isn't so useful when you have an actual desktop computer. Especially these days when laptops top out at half the RAM and cores as a baseline desktop.
When my laptop is functioning as a laptop, I still want connectivity. Both routine (SD/USB drives, headphones, HSM if I ever find a good Free one), and all the useful ports for ad-hoc situations (eg wired ethernet). Some of these do go away with time (eg RS-232), but prematurely deprecating still-popular ports and pretending that dongles are a decent solution for portable connectivity is ridiculous.
No more docking to one side of the machine...
Using a mac was always involved a level of trust. They made machines that were good enough to keep buying. They were pricey but always had good connectivity, even if it wasn't always a standard connection (firewire...). But if you want a mac, its not like you have a lot of other options besides what apple puts out.
The new machine is not completely terrible though it means dongles.. Lots of dongles. Needs more RAM, the SDHC slot (every camera still uses these) and a couple plain usb3.0 ports (external drives are useful and aren't all usb C yet). I use my machine portably and "docked attached to monitors" at work. The new function keys bar is useless to me when at work.