I haven’t had the opportunity to work on this yet, but if we do get this working it will still need a hard drive to boot to. If you use an NVMe it will be significantly faster than the SD card and doesn’t require the EEPROM flashing to get it working (my guide covers how).
The board doesn’t have the price/performance ratio of a laptop, but that’s not really what the goal of this board was. The goal of this board is to have a functional RISC-V PC, and it’s really the first board that can claim to be that. As RISC-V matures I expect we will see much better price/performance ratio, but for now this technology is still very new and the price will reflect that.