To me they are necessary evil. I currently have Fold4 and use it as a replacement for my laptop since I have to be available 24/7 or close to that. I grew tired of lugging my laptop everywhere, which admittedly is very lightweight but charger, bag, accessories and the rest are not. So I decided to give Fold + bluetooth keyboard a shot at replacing my laptop which worked and I can get away with 85-90% of my work from my phone. Not as comfortable as laptop or desktop, but it’ll do.
Biggest downsides are that I can’t use my phone (easily) for navigation. One would think with such big screen that would be even easier, but naah. Mounting foldable phone is near impossible. It can be done in a car where you just buy tablet mount and you are good, but I don’t drive a car.
For me it’s been a game of tradeoffs. I gain some, lose some. At times it’s awesome on other times it’s annoying. Big screen and pen come very handy when signing documents for work or giving instructions to developers by drawing on screen shots. At the same time it’s heavy and bulky. Note series from Samsung was pretty much spot on what I needed, but they turned that into S2x Ultra, which I think would be too big for me, but I might change my opinion.
Everything else am fine with and I can get use to weight and all. Samsung needs to do few things for me to be happy. Pen needs to fit in the phone itself, lugging it around as addon to your phone case is not an option. Make a slim case which grips corners only like they did with S7 Edge series, this would solve all of my mounts and protection problems. Weight loss would be welcome but I can live with that.