I've sketched out ideas for something like the MNT Reform, but with a Framework motherboard, and it's surprisingly hard to whittle down the form factor any more without sacrificing unique and useful features, like the user-replaceable battery cells and modular mechanical keyboard. Those were the main attractions for me, and it is indeed very weak hardware for the price. Tallying up the component prices, it's about as good as it gets without economies of scale while insisting on libre firmware.

Those things aren't nearly as cool, though (IMO)

It's around ~48°C under my regular coding workload (Chrome, Firefox, Slack and phpStorm opened with a video playing). It's basically unhearable under these conditions, with the fan running on the lowest speed.

The max temperature it gets to is ~83°C, which it will reach fairly quick when playing demanding games like Cyberpunk and the device gets a little warm, but not annoyingly hot then. Yes, it's a little thicc boii, but that works for its benefit because the thickness comes from the big heatpipe, fan and cooler.

Disclaimer: I put a PTM7950 pad onto the CPU and it greatly benefits from it. Temps with regular paste are worse - I definitely reached temps in the 90s before (but it was not throttling).

That's true, but I found parts like the bottom chassis, display assembly and keyboard on Aliexpress. They probably have the joystick modules too.

The only thing I couldn't find were the actual rubber thumbsticks, which might become a problem in the future when they wear out. GPD promised to sell them individually a while ago, but as of yet, they haven't done so.

It is really well made. I had to take the whole machine apart to put in a QWERTZ keyboard and almost everything is easily replaceable and maintainable. The frame feels as sturdy as a typical Macbook chassis, the joystick elements are screwed in and can be swapped quickly, the motherboard and cooling system are also well assembled.

The only thing I hated is that they glued the power button onto the backlight foil of the keyboard. I don't know what they were thinking, but glueing a flimsy flextape onto a flimsy foil is a horrible decision. Granted, most people probably never change their keyboard (but they didn't have the 64GB model with German layout back when I bought it).

When gaming, I hold the device in both hands, just as they depict in their marketing material:

When I'm on location and I have it sitting on the desk, I use the left joystick for scrolling and the right for moving the mouse, it works really well and I don't have to grip it (I configured AntiMicroX on Linux to translate the inbuilt Xbox controller to mouse movements).

It also has a builtin mouse mode, but you have to press the right trigger to speed up the mouse, so it's very unconvenient when you're not holding the device in your hands.

yes. yes it is.