i feel this strongly enough that i've actually put a lot of effort into polishing termux and tasker to let me do almost everything i would usually on my *nix systems easily
i have things like ffmpeg, imagemagick, and exiftool running natively on the thing
i have dev tools to let me write and compile Ruby and C, install libraries and gems, and my whole emacs configuration running natively
i even made a PR to termux-tasker to let me combine the two even more than usual so i could manage services
i've definitely learned a lot along the way too
mostly quirks in AOSP and ARM, but also how to do some legit android development and how the OS actually even works as a whole (it really is just a linux, but it's an unwieldy one with a few restrictions for security purposes that can mostly be bypassed in userspace)
at this point, i'm actually pretty confident that i wouldn't even need a laptop for dev reasons beyond convenience
i mean, my standard environment for making things was actually fully possible from the start!
i even have my fancy key-only multi-hop ssh configurations working, so my tunnelled git repos and emacs tramp work out of the box
a few examples of things i've managed to do natively in termux:
...all without the help of a more "powerful" or "complete" desktop system