The hate for laptops is mostly gone as the mobile market has ROCKETED in recent years and portability has become more important than ever. Nowadays if you say "I need a laptop for portability"
I highly doubt you're going to get idiots going "booo laptop sux desktop is BETTAR".
E.g. for someone who hops between different houses a lot or needs to go on vacation but still wants to play PC games, a laptop is perfect because they don't have to lug-around a freaking case + monitor + keyboard + mouse + cables + etc every time, that's just not possible.
Asus gaming laptops are great in general, decent power/stability albeit their 17" models can get really bulky (as you say)...but the point is you can still chuck it in a bag and carry it around, and it will run most games on decent settings
Yeah sure you will always be able to build a vastly more powerful PC for the price of a gaming laptop, but what the hell, that's just the cost of an all-in-one portable system :P
Also I think your GPU is a
GTX670M, not GTX 670, there is a pretty huge difference :P