Regarding 4, did you ever consider trying a gaming laptop? Razer is coming out with some pretty insane builds at very small form factors.
As for tools, yea that was always a bummer. Some cities have hacker barns or whatever but it really depends on where you are. As always, I recommend digital nomads that like buildin shit to check out Taipei, the maker crowd is HUGE there (relatively).
As an expat(who doesn't know how long until I might move again) it's not just about gaming IMO.
Anything you buy is just more weight to move to the next place. If you enjoy technology and novelty it hurts, think about all interesting that can come out of IoT, you can't just get a new thermostat or put a smart mirror in a place you don't own and need landlord approval.
It gets worse if you are living as a hardcore nomad moving from place to place within a few months, you need to have a limited supply of clothes, shoes and other similar things.
Clevo and Sager are great too. The performance gap between desktop and laptop GPUs has been closing so rapidly that imo there's almost no reason to get a desktop rig even though gaming laptops were godawful even 5 years ago
They still lose hands down in the performance/dollar metric. Also, CPU performance is not in the same ballpark. Similarly marked parts (eg. desktop i7 vs laptop i7) have widly different performance characteristics, mostly due to thermal budgets.
But you CAN game in a laptop that doesn't require a backpack-sized power adapter now, and that's great. They're just not the most economical choice.
As for tools, yea that was always a bummer. Some cities have hacker barns or whatever but it really depends on where you are. As always, I recommend digital nomads that like buildin shit to check out Taipei, the maker crowd is HUGE there (relatively).