It's really common for laptops to only support charging, display output and Thunderbolt on the USB-C ports on one side of the laptop while the other side gets j

It's really common for laptops to only support charging, display output and Thunderbolt on the USB-C ports on one side of the laptop while the other side gets just a 5 or 10Gbps USB port (and probably the headphone jack). This asymmetry usually comes from a design where the high-speed/high-power ports are on the motherboard and the lower-speed ports are on a separate board connected by a ribbon cable. That enables the OEM to use the same boards for multiple laptop sizes (eg 13" and 15", or 15" and 17") just by swapping in a longer ribbon cable. Using a cable capable of carrying Thunderbolt signals and charger input would negate a lot of those cost savings.