I don't see people going out of their way either. I know it's not explicitly stated, but there's a bit of a subtext of getting something for nothing in these articles about turning laptop screens into monitors. I can see the appeal of $50 + something you already own becomes a small high DPI monitor. For me personally, and for what I assume is the majority of the contributors to HN, I see the computers in front of me as a distributed system, each with different capabilities. To dumb it down to two or three screens attached to one computer is a downgrade from the cross-platform multi-screen environment I can build if each of these screens is attached to its own computer.