One more data-point: I've purposefully worked on a thin client. I had an employer that gave us access to powerful machines but not laptop, so I bought a cheap,

One more data-point: I've purposefully worked on a thin client. I had an employer that gave us access to powerful machines but not laptop, so I bought a cheap, under-powered laptop and did almost everything on the servers. My experience was that at first it was great and I appreciated the habits the constraints encouraged. Then I took a job where I was given a beefy laptop and immediately noticed a whole bunch of pain points that I had just been living with that disappeared entirely. The good habits from having a low-powered machine can transfer onto a high-powered machine, but there is are a whole lot of little irritations that completely go away when you have more computing power locally available.