I suppose that would work, but a one-time big laptop purchase that is then owned by the studio is easier to justify than buying a machine abroad(not to mention you can test that the laptop works several times before going, a brand new desktop might/might not work and people usually arrive a day or two before a conference so it's not like there's loads of time to debug problems before the big show).

With counter-terrorism, I would hope companies then have a contingency plan for governments imminently banning laptops on international flights.

With global inventories, it shouldn't be that hard for major vendors like Dell or Apple to offer an identical configuration to drop a hard drive into.