For what I've seen, displays have become a commodity and that's a good thing. I can go buy any kind of display, choose a size and I'm probably fitted with more pixels than I ever need, the panels are neat, flicker-free and flat, and the best part of it is that they cost next to nothing. You buy a laptop and you choose the size based on how much hardware you want to carry around — not because you need this huge screen because all laptop screens are "good enough" as you mentioned: I haven't had a laptop with less than 1440x900 for... a little less than a decade. And the resolution has never been inadequate for browsing, coding, drawing, writing and watching movies which is what I mostly do.
This is completely the opposite of what we had in the 90's when 15" CRT was the baseline, you were always a bit short of resolution and you never had the money to buy that huge one-cubic-meter-in-size display that could do your 1280x960 at 60Hz or something, and for which you probably had to upgrade your graphics card and probably your PC too. That totally, totally sucked. One could live with the basic resolution and screen size but I remember the agony of something better always being almost at reach. These days screens are something you don't think about twice. Everything is, again, dreadedly good enough, and if you need something professional you can get that too it probably won't cost you the price of a small car.
In the last 10 years or so I haven't considered once whether I should soon upgrade to a "better" display or to a laptop with a "better" screen. That's bliss, IMHO.