Business laptops are a bad deal if you buy them retail, without a doubt. Businesses get service and hardware deals from Dell, and buy these computers in bulk, which cuts down the per unit cost a good bit.

Even then, based on specs they're still not a "great deal" but as other people have touched on in this thread, the extended support with drivers, bios updates and on-site service that gets rolled in with these business focused models makes them a much less "wasteful" purchase when done that way. The business focused models tend to not have as many hardware revisions, so the same driver packages and images can be used over a longer time period.

The article is right in saying your average consumer looking for 1 new laptop is better off buying something else, but insinuating that businesses are just wasting money on these is a more complex argument that I'm more spurious about.