Secondly, there's not really enough room to work unless you can do your work on a phone; even if there were enough room for a decent-sized laptop between you and the seat in front, you'd still have to put everything away and get up whenever the people away from the aisle wanted out, which is every 15 minutes or so, seemingly. This problem also exists for reading.
Also, when you're driving, there's always the possibility of stopping at something that interests you, or taking a different route. You are in control of your own movement, in a way that you aren't at all in a train, where you can't realistically choose to do something differently. Even a comfortable jail is still jail (though Amtrak, at least, is no more comfortable than business-class flying), and while you might choose to put yourself in a traveling jail for 12 hours, the lack of freedom to choose differently halfway through will, of course, wear on you.
I took a train when I moved from Alabama to the DC metro area last year, and I quickly realized I should have flown. There was absolutely nothing to recommend the experience over flying, which is very similar, except much shorter and somewhat cheaper (and Amtrak, the train I took, is subsidized, so a train that actually reflected its true cost in the ticket price would be, at current standards, an economy-class experience with a luxury-class price).