Laptops are kind of in their own separate price bracket for various reasons, so when we say "$400-$500 console killer," we're referring to a desktop PC that you purchase all of the parts for and assemble yourself.

As a gaming laptop owner, the two biggest things that prohibit them from being truly price competitive are size and difficulty of manufacturing. When we recommend a gaming desktop, we always give you a list of parts that will work with each other and give what we believe to be optimal gaming performance at that price point (assuming you run games that are GPU bound, which is representative of a majority of today's games). Because component manufacturers sell individual parts wholesale with the intention of others using them in builds, this gives us a healthy choice of low-cost parts that we can cherry pick. The defining factor for this is that all of these parts are built to be compatible with certain specifications, like the ATX standard, and all things considered it's not very difficult to put them together into a working machine.

With laptops, though, you've got two primary restrictions not present in desktops: size and heat. All components generate heat, but the roominess of a desktop case lets you put big fans and heatsinks on your components to cool them down. In a laptop, you've suddenly restricted yourself to less than an inch for all of the components and airflow, and you now only have an inch or two to squeeze all of the circuitry from a desktop card into (which increases the amount of heat you generate). If your components are generating the same amount of heat as a desktop, you'll either need incredibly powerful/efficient cooling or you'll need to tone down the performance of the parts.

Toning down the performance also tackles another issue that's closely related: power consumption. In my HTPC, I'm rocking a 450W PSU, which gives my computer enough power to run everything quite well. My gaming laptop, on the other hand, came with a 180W charger, which itself is pretty ridiculous for a laptop. My laptop has to give me roughly the same performance as my desktop when running on less than half the energy, which once again means I either cannot run at the same performance or my components need to be ridiculously engineered to maximize efficiency. That costs money.

The reality of the situation is that squeezing desktop levels of power into a much smaller thermal profile drives up the cost of components, and with the trend towards paper-thin laptops you'll find there's nothing in the budget laptop market that can compete with a similarly priced custom desktop for gaming.