Sure, but 'laptop' can be changed very easily into any container or VM box somewhere that is tied to security/etc but still on a single box. Again sizing here

Sure, but 'laptop' can be changed very easily into any container or VM box somewhere that is tied to security/etc but still on a single box. Again sizing here is sort of beside the point, the point is, if its 500% worse to use than just doing it on a single instance/compute node, you better be offering A LOT of magic awesomeness that makes the performance drain acceptable. 10% cost for the benefits that this stuff can give you, that is pretty easy to swallow. 100%-500% perf. cost is just a very, very, very hard to swallow pill.