I totally agree minimalist design is hard. But I believe that in a given genre, minimalist designs will converge. Not completely, but they will tend toward one another simply by virtue of having a common destination. In this case having the simplest laptop design that can still get the job done.

I think that Apple has done the grunt work of whittling away the bulk material toward a minimal design. It would be stupid of somebody else with the same goals to try to pretend that Apple's efforts bore no fruit (sorry, camp not intended) and ignore them.