The barrier is primarily tooling costs. We'd have to have high enough confidence in the incremental sales of it to cover what would likely be in the mid six digits of custom tooling (Input Cover plastic and aluminum tooling, tooling for a three button trackpad, tooling for a new version of the keyboard with a cutout for a pointing stick, and a small amount of tooling for a semicustom pointing stick to fit that cutout).
Well, I'm using a ThinkPad right now and I don't own a Framework. Even though I tend to like each successive model less and less, I'm kind of resigned to my next laptop being a ThinkPad too :-P.
Whether the market justifies the investment is not a question I can answer, but the Framework looks pretty decent otherwise and if it had a pointing stick keyboard I would buy one and give it a go.
I think I paid about £300 for my TeX Shinobi, so I guess I'd be prepared to pay a similar premium on a laptop.
