I still think there are a lot of use cases missing from this flowchart. What about the guy who doesn't want to get a gaming laptop, so with that intention he saves his money and gets a machine at about $500. He doesn't need much storage at all and doesn't "download files off the internet" like it was stated on the diagram. Instead, he takes advantage of cloud storage whenever possible. There is no longer a need for him to store 200GB of music on his laptop because he has a beefed up google music account. He also uses an OS that is free and has a smaller footprint than Windows, and in fact, he can run everything he would run on Windows (basically just a browser, word processor, and if he's a CS major an assload of development tools that are in fact unique to GNU too) on a GNU/Linux distro, so go goes that route, especially because he never has to worry about removing bloatware. Because the amount of storage he needs is so small, he goes ahead and gets a small SSD (60-128GB), which is shock resistant (great for a machine which will get knocked around a lot as it's carried all across campus), boots up incredibly fast (resumes from hibernate in about 2-5 seconds), uses less energy (however this only negligibly affects battery life), produces less heat, and is quieter.

Now, about the whole USB3.0 thing not being needed, I'm not really sure when this was written, but today it can definitely help to have 1 or 2 USB3 ports in some cases. For instance, in the event that the guy that went with the $500 laptop ($600 after he upgraded the SSD) does want to couple some local storage with the small yet fast SSD, he could get a sizable USB3 external drive. While USB is still a very slow method for transfer rates, the third generation makes a considerable improvement over 2.0, so he will have better iops when using his external drive.

Also, I'm not completely sure why MS Office is automatically suggested. Especially if all they really need is a word processor. I've tried to turn on many of my friends to different FOSS alternatives, but a lot of them really just don't comare. I do agree that Office is many times better for most things. However, if they are only writing papers with this thing, and don't have to deal with spreadsheets or power point presentations, LibreOffice or even Google Docs will probably suffice.