Surely a laptop prototype based on such a tested and well-worn CPU with 48K of RAM would be cool, but shouldn't it sip power? Like shouldn't it last for like months on a charge? Or am I revealing my very meager and outdated understanding of engineering with only a bachelor in computer science from like 2004?
If you ran a 6502 emulator on a cheap ARM SOC, it would be much lower power.
6502 emulators can easily detect dumb endless loops, and that can turn into what's basically a Z80 HALT.
Also, the 100LX with monochrome CGA (80x24, 640x200), a 7.91 MHz 80186-compatible CPU, and 1MB or 2MB of RAM but the extra was used for file storage as drive C:.
The 200LX was the same as the 100LX but had newer software in ROM.