To each his own the decks are still lacking in the performance department because they can only go so high in power with gpus and CPUs. I know laptops have there limits too but they are much higher than handhelds.
It's going to be unique to each person. I'd say a college student is probably the ideal case for a gaming laptop, but even then you might run into issue with battery life and noise(can be mitigated with power states). I have a couple decent laptops and I used a laptop as my primary gaming PC for about a year. My laptop ended up plugged like a desktop to a monitor 90%+ of the time. It limits your upgrade path compared to a desktop, it lacks the perf/$, and it's comparatively noisy as well.
Even though I built a new desktop and bought a Deck I still hung onto my 3060 laptop as I have over a year of work on it, and there's important albeit extreme limited scenarios that I have use for portable power. What's funny is that I didn't feel safe rolling around with my spendy laptop full of my personal projects and data, so I ended buying another "throwaway" 5500U laptop for trips. Last year I took on trip to a music festival and I stayed in a Airbnb. It worked great for watching shows and editing pics and vids from the concerts, and a little light gaming.
So yeah, I'd recommend a desktop for everyday use(perf/$, quiet, upgradeable), a Deck for portable/couch/bed gaming, and an affordable laptop with a good CPU/RAM/SSD for bringing on trips.
