One thing that caught me off guard was the number of low end models with 4 GB of RAM and pricier models limited to 8 GB RAM. With Windows using nearly 2 GB on boot and a chunk being used for the GPU, that doesn't leave much for applications. Having a non-upgradable CPU is not a huge issue in my opinion, except the performance of low end models is astoundingly abysmal. I doubt that many of them could keep up with my 8 year old desktop, which was not a high end build at the time. Not only is the hardware disposable, in many cases it is intended to have a very short life.
Overall though, I would be happier if manufacturers were clear on what you are getting. While I do some real work on my laptop, I tend to offload most of my work onto a desktop. This means that I look for a handful of key features and don't care about the rest. Unfortunately, my last laptop purchasing experience was a nightmare. Researching a couple of laptops took more time than deciding upon parts for a desktop build and, of course, you have to look at more than a couple of laptops to find something that is acceptable in terms of features, performance, and price.
The amount of people asking if they can upgrade the CPU, GPU, SSD/HDD or memory in their new-ish laptops is disheartening. Most of the questions concerns the CPU og GPU where the answer is no 99.99% of the time these days. 90% of consumer grade laptops have the RAM soldered to the mainboard too now. Luckily the HDD/SSD is usually replaceable or upgradeable in case of failure, performance problems or lack of free disk space... but for how long?
From a purely ecological standpoint, the laptop producers should be forced to buy back and recycle all their shitty unupgradeable, unrepairable, made-to-fail consumer electronics. It's a shameful situation we are in.
If societies can get 99% of glas and plastic bottles recycled using bottle deposit money, we should be able to reach the same figures for consumer electronics like laptops.