I’m puzzled. On the one hand you don’t want the complexity of a Linux desktop, but you want the hassle that comes with changing GPUs. Over the life of a typical machine is it really worth upgrading the GPU separately?
Upgrading a GPU is not much of a hassle on an ordinary desktop, you open the case and plug it in, at worst you also need to upgrade the PSU. And you do that maybe once during the lifetime of the machine.
The real problem with the Apple approach though is that the very highest end SoC gives only the performance of a much cheaper midrange discrete chip and does not support all the software. Unified memory is nice, but that does not make up for it.
For me the answer is yes. It has been more important than upgrading the processor or anything else. But this depends upon your use case.
If you're a tinkerer or even just some kind of traditional PC gamer Mac just isn't a fun platform because there isn't much you can do with it besides buying a newer one. For a long time Windows was a good choice for this kind of user but less so now.
