When I bought this laptop the cheap thin clients came with eMMC storage. Keyboard and display are convenient for installations, backups and occasionally other uses. A decent size UPS is more than $100, uses power even when it's in standby and still doesn't last anywhere near the 7+ hours of the laptop battery when the power fails. I'm away for 3-4 weeks at a time and have had repeated power failures completely corrupt my server SSD during that time. Not everyone can fix a server problem within a few hours.

The laptop cost significantly less than a thin client, plus a gpu, plus a UPS and came with that nice keyboard and display, and a warranty. It only uses about 6-8 watts the majority of the time, important to me for a device that's always on.

Different people have different use cases than you do. Some of us even know what works best for us.

Maybe they want to be able to type things into it and look at the output without having to go over the network.