You know...
... i started reading and I thought you were having a ridiculous moan, (some corporations remove CD/DVDs and switch off USB on machines to help stop viruses coming in) As I read on, I realised you do, however, have a point.
Much of our networking and telephony equipment still falls back to a serial console cable should all else fail; and the hardware that is easiest to hulk around the site to take to the edge stacks is ... surprise surprise ... a laptop.
Many machines don't come with serial ports any more and those that do, seem to have some form of crazy hardware implementation going on that causes XP to report that the port is already in use when you even try to use hyperterm; the same happens with some USB/serial converters as well, and yet other of these devices have caused the creation of a brand new COM port with every boot.
With my CD drive dying in the car, I bought an SD/USB-FM player for a fiver, (saved me a three figure sum for a new stereo and a replacement face plate to fit a standard stereo in a non-standard car) but as long as CD/DVD/BluRay beats solid state for mass production costs, then disk is here to stay.
I have had a number of pieces of equipment (most notably PDAs) that were rendered useless when COM ports vanished from laptops. You couldn't hulk a desktop around when you worked out of a suitcase in foreign hotels.
There is only one solution to the problem that I have found ... which is that if the unit doesn't come with the features that you want ... then don't buy it. Spend your money with someone else instead and let the thoughtless manufacturers rot in hell.