I use 10gig for a dedicated link to a NAS. It drives me nuts that easily-accessible networking is so far behind storage speeds. SATA-I (2003) is faster than gigabit ethernet. SATA-II (2004) is faster than 2.5GigE.

So why 2.5GigE on a laptop? So when you're at your desk, where your laptop spends 90%+ of its life, your bulk storage can have access speeds that are at least from this century, if only just.

80Gbps usb4 2.0 host-to-host connectivity is 32x faster. (2^5 magnitudes.)

Coming soon to almost all decent laptops.

2.5 Gbit/s is slow when we're talking about storage. Even for a laptop. Some folks work with large files, like large VMs, raw video, etc.