HP's EliteBooks and ZBooks (and Z-series workstations) have always been incredibly solid computers that are trivial to repair and and upgrade. However for some unfathomable reason HP has always insisted on primarily marketing its low end consumer line of laptops, which tend to be complete dog shit.

I'd say that's common though. A lot of pc makers have widely different quality standards for their consumer and business lines.

It's "user friendly" in the companies/business sense.

These are business laptops, which means they're expected to be repairable over the amortisement lifecycle (3~5 years) and it's expected that most servicing can be performed by tech support and should not require a service call. Company purchasing a fleet of hundreds of laptops can just purchase a bunch of replacement parts alongside and keep it humming for years through user misuse and tear & wear.

Companies like HP and Lenovo offer onsite repair services for their business models. This forces them to make the parts easily accessible and replaceable.

I think the issue is that their image (same with Lenovo) is heavily tainted by their cheapo consumer stuff.

I'm curious what their latest behaviour is after they were caught installing spyware on their PCs. That is a bigger reason to not buy a brand than anything else in my mind, unless I only care about the hardware because I'm going to wipe it and install Ubuntu.

Yes, but just like with Lenovo, you need to differentiate between their consumer and their business line. Did they install the spyware on business computers as well? With Lenovo the case was only with non-Thinkpads.