It's not a feature right up to the moment you need something that is not part of the core offerings. Which I think is one of the major reasons for the screaming with the new macbooks. I can relatively quickly par down the ranges that interest me, but in the PC world I can be relatively sure that if my requirements change, somebody will make something that does what I need (both desktop and laptops).

What's really bad is that none of the big manufacturers is able to have useful website, so figuring out what you might be interested in is needlessly painful and involves external communities.