> Industrial users are not price sensitive

That's not a universal truth. I've worked with plenty who are.

> Having the keyboard, monitor, and computer in a single housing with a built-in UPS all in a compact device with a single power cord is a big selling point.

That's not a universal truth either. Sometimes the device will be a headless controller. In which case a laptop wouldn't always the right form factor. There might be additional hardware that needs supporting, which can be much more complicated with laptops. There might be other requirements (eg environmental constraints) too.

"Industrial" covers a pretty large spectrum of use cases.

Thank you, I've clarified the comment by adding the word "many". It is a generalization, that holds in many but not all cases.

Indeed, but isn’t that literally what I said in my original comment?

I was emphasizing the utility of having the entire system packaged as a single unit (a laptop) for these clients.

But if you use DOS still for industrial stuff you usually do it because you need some old-fashioned interface (i.e. real serial or parallel ports are the usual example). Which is going to work great from inside a VM, not.

If you need real, physical RS-232, rs-422, rs-485, CANbus, 2wire, or parallel ports you're not buying a mass market modern laptop either.

Having worked in this world, I have sometimes patched DOSBox to communicate with all types of extravagant hardware, even ISA cards (look hard enough and you'll find even Core motherboards with ISA slots...).

Sure, but you presumably don't buy FreeDOS in a VM off-the-shelf for that, but setup the specific right thing for your use cases.