I understand your feeling about having a place for a desktop. I have a fairly new desktop at my office after having a laptop for a while. I am much more comfortable with the desktop for business use and have a laptop for home and fun use. Desktops seem to have the ability to add hardware and the like. Laptops have the portability and many of the newest ones are packed with internal power. It really is what you are good with. I am probably "old school" and lean to liking desktops although I love having the laptop too. Big help huh.

While I have and use laptops, I still prefer desktops. There is nothing like a properly set up workstation with an ergonomic keyboard, quality mouse, big display, comfortable chair, nice speakers, etc. Desktops are more upgradable and easier to fix too. They just stink at the portability factor. Glad I don't have to choose one or the other.

I love my laptop and would be lost without it... but my desktop is still my preferred means of computing.  With a 24" monitor (the only reason I don't get a larger one is because my desk's hutch can't accommodate that) I get more screen real estate, having a full-size keyboard is helpful when working in SSH on my servers, and the upgradeability of the desktop is important for me as a gamer.  Another factor to consider is cost: for two equivalent-spec systems, the laptop will always cost more than the desktop.

As far as the larger monitor and keyboard argument goes though, you can always get said peripherals and hook them up to a laptop at a desk, providing you with a desktop experience from laptop hardware.  Then, when you're on the move, just unplug the laptop and take off.

With a laptop, once it starts showing its age hardware-wise, you pretty much have to start considering the purchase of a new laptop... you can give it a small boost by installing an SSD or some extra RAM, but that's about as far as you can take it.  With a desktop, you can add multiple hard drives, the RAM upgrade path is usually much higher, you can add the latest optical drive (such as a blu-ray burner), and even upgrade the video... all piecemeal rather than buying a new computer.  You can even upgrade the processor to a limited degree (unless you bought in at the end of a generation and the next gen uses a different socket).

Of course the entire upgrade argument hinges on how comfortable you are building/upgrading your system.  If you're the sort of person who prefers to just buy your computer, unpack it, plug it in and go, upgrades incur the additional overhead of consulting with tech-savvy friends or a professional to determine your upgrade path, and paying someone else to install it for you.

TL;DR: your mileage may vary; the only two firm arguments for desktop are upgradeability (if you're into that) and price/performance ratio.

Thank you all for your input.

Well, my new computer turned out to be a surprise choice. My priority became finding a decent machine with Windows 7. I love the touchscreen on my Playbook tablet, but wouldn't want to lean over a desk to tap it too long. So, I got a traditional laptop. I finally cut the cord from the tower. It's actually a semi-business HP. Certainly not made for photo editing, but a monitor and wireless desktop will be coming along soon. I got the best of both worlds with the OS. Win 7 Pro 64 is installed, with full OEM DVDs of that plus Win 8.

Win 7 will also run my old Office 2003, and give me time to translate all my life history from Outlook to open formats. I already uploaded almost 10 years of my calendars to Zoho. It's not perfect but it's a good start. The thousands of emails will take a bit more effort.

I still wonder about what's going to happen with touch screens in the next year or so. I think what we have now will probably seem as innovative but basic as Apple's first mouse. Now I have a couple of years to keep clicking pointers and using physical keys. Maybe by then I'll have learned how to cut and paste text using my index finger.

Win 7 will also help me through next year when my two veteran XP computers (laptop and netbook) "age out" of Microsoft support. At least one will become a speedster with Ubuntu. It's kind of lousy that my "last" desktop memory was a Vista machine. But I guess it was poetic justice that my Vista headache was the only machine I lost to hurricane Sandy!

Yes, there's ergonomic issues with touch interfaces that are yet to be sorted out. Ideally, for anything other than short bursts of computer activity, you want to keep your arms by your sides with your wrists at elbow height or lower and your head looking straight ahead or slightly down. It's difficult to envisage a touch interface that maintains this posture. Maybe an improved version of a touchpad, perhaps? Even so, there's still the problem that it's much more tiring to hold your arm above a touchpad than it is to lean on a keyboard support or mouse.