tl;dr: a thicker bottom bezel allows the necessary space for a better keyboard layout without shrinking the touchpad, and makes the laptop more usable when your eyes are at heights closer to that of the screen rather than looking down on it from above
Because I have poor eyesight but I like to keep a lot of text on my screen, I often work partially or fully reclined with my laptop lying on my chest or my stomach. When I do this, the height of my fingers as they rest on the keyboard tends to obscure the bottom part of the screen on 'modern' laptops with super-thin bezels all around, so I have to reduce the height of my full-screen terminal.
On older laptops, where the bottom bezel may be a full inch or more tall, I don't need this. Additionally, I prefer a full, standard, IBM style keyboard layout: a dedicated row of F keys, spaced out in the standard way, and with full-sized arrow keys. One problem with such keyboards is that they compromise the size of the trackpad, because of th space they take up on the bottom of the laptop. On keyboards without trackpoints, or with designs centered on large, excellent trackpads like MacBooks, this cannot work well.
So for me, an ideal hardware setup for input on a laptop might well be something like a MBP, but with a 3:2 display and a bottom bezel 1-2 inches tall, which would allow for a full-size keyboard alongside a spacious, Mac-like trackpad.
I would, if only along the bottom!
tl;dr: a thicker bottom bezel allows the necessary space for a better keyboard layout without shrinking the touchpad, and makes the laptop more usable when your eyes are at heights closer to that of the screen rather than looking down on it from above
Because I have poor eyesight but I like to keep a lot of text on my screen, I often work partially or fully reclined with my laptop lying on my chest or my stomach. When I do this, the height of my fingers as they rest on the keyboard tends to obscure the bottom part of the screen on 'modern' laptops with super-thin bezels all around, so I have to reduce the height of my full-screen terminal.
On older laptops, where the bottom bezel may be a full inch or more tall, I don't need this. Additionally, I prefer a full, standard, IBM style keyboard layout: a dedicated row of F keys, spaced out in the standard way, and with full-sized arrow keys. One problem with such keyboards is that they compromise the size of the trackpad, because of th space they take up on the bottom of the laptop. On keyboards without trackpoints, or with designs centered on large, excellent trackpads like MacBooks, this cannot work well.
So for me, an ideal hardware setup for input on a laptop might well be something like a MBP, but with a 3:2 display and a bottom bezel 1-2 inches tall, which would allow for a full-size keyboard alongside a spacious, Mac-like trackpad.