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Apart from styling, what is the difference between a portable workstation and a gaming laptop?

Whether the focus is on graphics or computation, I expect.

Too bad GPUs are terrible for compute then

Which one focuses which way? When I think "workstation", I picture people doing CAD, video editing, and GPU-accelerated simulations and number crunching, in addition to people compiling code.

Games aren't just GPU-bound, either. Unreal says they develop their games on systems with "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970" and "Six-Core Xeon E5-2643 @ 3.4GHz".

https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/Basics/InstallingUn...

Developing games is different from playing them. The latter takes a pretty beefy GPU (for a given generation) before the CPU is a likely potential bottleneck.

I like to think the main differentiator is whether the GPU is optimised for TF64 or TF32. But, really the boundaries are blurred for sure.

Workstations are of course a little bit more specialized so not everything needs to be satisfied, but I'd expect a workstation to typically have:

A differently tuned CPU (more cores or higher base clock depending on the workload, less emphasis on boosting).

More RAM.

Higher resolution display could be nice, no need for 240fps.

Workstation rather than gaming graphics card.

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