Bummer that the laptop was such a.... I'm gonna be a little bit mean here: totally normal experience. I had a second-gen intel imac (965, core2duo, maybe this was technically the third gen?) and it absolutely blew every PPC Mac I'd ever had out of the water, performance-wise. But it didn't have a laptop hinge to break, and I passed it along before the Radeon X1600 became unsoldered from the board.

Pre-Intel, Apple was years behind in terms of speed. I have benchmarks matching the 1.67 PowerBook G4 (2005) to a Pentium 4 Mobile (2002) - so it was a bit catch-up moment, but the first Intel laptops were, basically, built like normal Mac laptops at at the time. I don't remember them being any worse or better, if I'm honest maybe slightly better aside from some bad choices with the edge plastics.

It wasn't really until the 2008+ metal unibody machines that we get to Apple being an absolutely wild outlier in terms of "laptops that just kind of physically last forever".

I ended up switching from that iMac to a ThinkPad because of rumors of their legendary physical reliability and what I found was: if you carry a laptop around with you, it will physically wear out. There is basically no exception to this rule, perhaps, as mentioned, save the metal unibodies, in generations where the graphics don't come unsoldered from the board or where the SATA Cables don't die or the RAM slots don't fall out.