I rather prefer that they give you only a single DIMM, so you can add another for a rather reasonable 32GB. It would be even better, if it came empty, so you could just add whatever you want in there.
Without an iGPU single channel DRAM often isn't as bad as you'd think, at least compared to having too little overall.
Many DDR4 laptops still came with at least one SO-DIMM slot, which allowed me to go to at least 40GB by replacing the 8GB SO-DIMM with a 32GB stick. That gives you 16GB of dual-channel and 24GB of single, but since the iGPU's frame buffer gets configured to the dual channel part, the actual performance loss for CPU code and data is minimal compared to paging. Latency doesn't suffer from single channel and then it's mostly caches that enable true performance.
Even swapping gaming textures from host RAM might not suffer too much, because the dGPU link is only PCIe v4 x8 at best, meaning you won't reach dual channel DDR5 speeds anyway.
Same with that pathetic DRAM-less tiny NVMe or the bad Wifi cards: I'd rather add my own than pay even a few Euros for eWaste.
I replaced everything pluggable in my LOQ and still came out way cheaper than a vendor configured system would have cost.
Yes, that is quite a bit lighter, but that extra weight here is quite obviously required for the extra cooling. The LOQ has a way more efficient CPU and the 4060 is only allowed around 90 Watts there: a 170 Watt power supply on the LOQ vs. a 330 Watt variant here hint where the power is going and why the weight is needed.
My LOQ is doing rather well with near half the power, because it doesn't waste energy on the higher resolution, which doesn't really pay off that much on a 16" screen.
Your tests seem to reflect what I was thinking about the newer variants of the LOQ which upgrade to Phoenix and 3k resolution: it's often beyond what you can do with a mobile 4060 and becomes a much less well balanced system that is also far more expensive.
My impression is that you may be better off with the THD display and the extra frames per second than going for 3k and slower refresh.
And if you are playing a less demanding title, you can still go for Dynamic Super Resolution which can smooth out some edge flickering and may give you a very similar visual gaming experience than native 3k (e.g. FarCry 5++).
But both just aren't meant to be carried around all day or run on battery as long. Still can't have it all in a single form factor and I doubt it can be done.
I see drastically diminishing returns for portable gaming laptops beyond 200 Watt and drastic loss of portabillity above 25 Watts peak power. In that middle area you can easily pay between €500 and €4000, but user experience or performance doesn't scale with the money you invest, so you better play it smart and don't just go for the extreme specs.
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