There are thousands of design tradeoffs to be made in a laptop. Is EPEAT willing to update and republish their rules every time a manufacturer finds a better solution that doesn't comply with the rules? The guidelines seem to track well with 2000 era PCs and cell phones.
From what I can see (EPEAT does not make their guidelines available without payment, there may have been something useful in their Resources section, but I'm finding broken links to third party file sharing sites) they have a set of categories that are required and some that are optional. By how many optionals you meet you get a bronze, silver, or gold rating. Apple marketing can't tolerate anything but a gold.
The guidelines I see don't have flexibility to them. For instance, if you can reduce your glass consumption by 50% by gluing it to something that can acceptably be chucked into the glass recycler, that may be a better environmental decision, but it may also be forbidden by EPEAT.
EPEAT says things need to be taken apart with "common tools". Does the pentalobular screw head count? I doubt it. Even if Apple sends pentalobular screwdrivers with each pallet of computers to the recycler it doesn't count for EPEAT.