scam I swear, I've seen top of the line $5k laptops that run worse than my $2k desktop

I mean, they can't dissipate anything like the amount of heat or use the amount of power. A desktop is going to outperform a laptop.

And while you don't mention it, most laptops like that can't run long at full CPU+GPU load on a 100Wh battery, and virtually no laptops have more than a 100Wh battery. So you have to plug in or at least carry a power station.

But I don't see how that makes them a scam. There are people who really and honestly have to move around. Windows in particular is not very friendly to being used remotely, so if they can't be mobile, they can't use it, much less for gaming.

The only thing I think I could call scammy is that there are some items that have the same laptop and desktop names, like, oh, the laptop and desktop Geforce RTX 4090, which do not remotely perform the same. I think that it's pretty fair to say that Nvidia did that to exploit user confusion.

I think that it's more accurate to say that laptops come with some substantial performance tradeoffs, and that it's important to be aware of those. It's not that it's unreasonable to play games on a laptop, and there are people who are going to want to do so.