I work in a school and we purchase a whole heap of laptops every year. For that price we’d be looking at a student device, defenitely one of the cheaper ones. But yes, we’d expect more than 2 years out of them. Again, we don’t buy consumer devices because they have horrible build quality and get an education + bulk discount.

I think the reasoning is that if you buy a mid-quality machine, it will not have top quality manufacturing?

Thinkpads are pretty solid business class machines.