Especially in a laptop - at the cheaper end the CPU might not be upgradeable at all, while the RAM should be and is often quite easy to do yourself. Likewise on HDD / SSD - if you're tight on funds now there's no need to go big on these, especially if they aren't going to be used for any...
How recently have you used Docs stuff? It's come a long way from the early days. Still not reached feature parity with Word as yet, but it has everything the majority of people will need.