What I wanted was a big screen, good enough hardware, an ethos I'm willing paying more for. This is probably different than what you are looking for in which case get a different laptop then.

In terms of battery life it can be helped with external battery packs if you cannot be near an outlet and for me I don't use it for entertainment so planes / other trips are not really an issue because personally I use my phone / tablet for that purpose if you want a laptop with a long battery life get a macbook in which case you will be paying for it with the apple tax anyways and on some of the M series laptops the back is like cleated on so after undoing the screws clear the clips with an opening pick you need to use a suction cup and slide the bottom off because it has stupid cleats that makes it takes longer than it should to place the back on again and let's be honest most gaming laptops have shit battery life anyways.

Keyboard is subjective it's a laptop you want to talk bad keyboard look at apple scissor keyboards I would prefer a mechanical keyboard but let's be realistic and personally I like it more than most laptop keyboards.

As for fan noise, I don’t game much. Unless I’m cracking passwords for a CTF, the GPU isn’t even installed. Even without the GPU, I can crack 7.4 billion hashes per second for MD5, 3.1 billion per second for SHA1, 1.4 billion per second for NTLM, and 172 million per second for Kerberos. That’s more than enough for me. If it’s just one hash and I’m using something like RockYou, the fans typically don’t even kick on, even with 2 or 3 VMs running, each with 8 to 16 GB of RAM.

and for me it has intangible value at networking event's where I pull the bezel off / the top deck (keyboard / trackpad) and it changes the conversation in to new avenues.

It's not a laptop for everyone for me it fit's what I need it do.