Of course after you do the minimization, you move to a technology mapping step that takes these things into account. "the fact that your DNF PAL circuit might

Of course after you do the minimization, you move to a technology mapping step that takes these things into account. "the fact that your DNF PAL circuit might just be two layers of NAND (equivalent to a layer of AND feeding into an OR layer) is kind of an implementation detail, isn't it?" No. That's absolutely, 100% fundamental. It's called "Canonical Form" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_normal_form https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_normal_form It's canonical for a reason.