But of course I am running build tools and bunch of other dev tools locally that are not even installed on our servers.
But in all reality, laptops are really, really powerful these days.
My laptop at the moment is a HPE something ... HP 250 G6 Notebook PC according to dmidecode. I used to have a five year old Dell 17" i7 based beast but it ... broke. I whipped out the SSD, shrank the root fs a bit (with gparted) and used a clonezilla disc and an external USB link to get my system onto a Samsung EVO M.2 thingie from the SSD. This laptop was an employee cast off/
As is probably apparent from the above, I use Linux. I have some decent apps at my disposal but in general I don't need much hardware. Decent: RAM >= 8GB and SSD storage are key. I don't play games much. I've always specified 17" screens in the past for my laptops but now I have to use a 15" jobbie, that's becoming less of a hard requirement.
I am a Managing Director (small business - IT consultancy) but I do spend rather a lot of my time doing sysadmin and network admin stuff. I also do business apps. I once wrote a Finite Capacity Plan for a factory in Excel with rather a lot of VBA. Before you take the piss, bear in mind I used the term finite and not infinite. That meant that quite a few people had employment in Plymouth (Devon not MA) in the 1990s. I won't bore you with my more modern failures 8)
Anyway as you say, modern laptops are phenomenally powerful. Mine have wobbly windows 8) I can't be arsed with MS Windows anymore for my own gear - it gets in the way. Me and the wife said goodbye at Windows 7.
I don't care where those snapshots are stored and how much space those take. In case I need to restore my IaaS provider gives me 2-click option to restore - one to click restore and 2nd to confirm. I sit and watch progress. I also don't care about hardware replacement and anything that connects to that. I have to do VPS OS updates but that is it.
I do my own data backups on different VPS of course just in case my provider has some issue, but from convenience perspective that IaaS solution is delivering more than I would ask for.