Not a single person in my office has a laptop that costs over ~400 GBP.
It may come as a shock to you but there exists a world outside of California/London/random-tech-hub
You can't walk into/click onto a high-street store and buy that though, and my assumption is that's where most people buy laptops.
£670 is much more than people I know want to spend on a new machine. None of them have ever mentioned screen resolution when i've asked what they want in a laptop.
£670 is not "only".
That being said, my parents are perfectly happy using Google chrome on 2gb ram with a core 2 duo. And that's not with only a few tabs.