1) Latency 2) Developing custom hardware that needs to be attached to dev box 3) No rage when the wifi at the airport sucks 4) etc

Even though you don't need lots of power, there's plenty of solid and valid reasons why others might.

Exactly: a few reasons.

Moreover

1. latency is low enough that people are playing triple AAA video games on AWS for a $1/hr.

https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-ow...

2. Sure, that's a good reason. It had better be spewing out lots of data, though, or again, you might as well process in the cloud.

3. Being able to access your workstation via airport wifi at all is actually a benefit in this case, unless you intend to wheel it around like a suitcase.

> Being able to access your workstation via airport wifi at all is actually a benefit in this case, unless you intend to wheel it around like a suitcase

Did you walk out of a 1980s time warp or something? The workstation in this case carries 1TB of storage and weighs 3.5 lbs. (And it still has wifi in case you need that).

Latency is still annoying. I prefer VMs still.

Regarding your number 3. For a lot of this, we are talking about devices like the MacBook Pro line. Not huge workstations.