Unless I'm playing games or otherwise hammering the CPU or graphics, I'd like my laptop to be cool and virtually silent. Generally day to day laptop usage doesn't really need the power of the processors they usually have, instead either automatically running the processor very underclocked and with unnecessary cores switched off, or having a second, low power processor and only turn on the high power processor when needed. Similarly with the graphics system.
As a side effect, this should extend battery life, but that is less of a concern to me as I don't often have mine off the mains power.