It's not all that bad once you have done a few. This guy took forever in the video and missed some key time-savers. First, that battery powered screwdriver is about 3x slower than a regular driver. Second, it took him way too long to pop the palmrest off using the spudger card. Pulling from the "CD Rom hole" with one finger flexes the assembly and releases the interlocking hooks around the case frame, a 2 second ordeal.
It's not really an HP thing, though. It's a price thing. Acer, Asus, Dell, and Toshiba have also offered "budget" laptops that do not have doors. Apparently, that plastic door and screw must save enough to make sense deleting it for these types. I call them sub-budget laptops. They are sub-budget because if you take the parts individually, and value them, you generally end up more than its retail price point (real-people cost, looking at BOM costs). Obviously HP gets price reductions on volume, but still, I bet HP makes $10 on these but it is worth it because of the add-on/recurring features, software bundling, support and simply having their brand competing on each tier of the store shelves.
I always tell my customers this: "It doesn't matter so much the brand as it does the cost. Stay $600 and above and you will be more likely to get a decent computer. If you want a good computer, spend $1000."
HP makes some really nice machines, but nice machines are never cheap. The Elitebook line is usually first-rate.
IMO, the best "cheap" budget computer is Lenovo. Even at low price points they still invest in the design. I feel that is where HP and others fall behind on their cheap offerings, case design/structural integrity. Lenovo does a decent job on their cheapo's.
EDIT:
No, not all wireless cards are the same. The designs are standardized by the IEEE and come in a handful of flavors and bus types. Some are smaller, some larger and longer. With wireless cards, just because it fits in the slot doesn't mean it will work. Sometimes the BIOS will only initialize certain WIFI chip models.
