Laptop with cellular connectivity a concern?

Wrong. you can remove the antenna easily, you can remove the cellular modem easily. You can disable it within the EFI bios on a thinkpad. No need to configure anything within linux. Buy the laptop take out the card, it usually is combined with the Wi-Fi card so you may have to buy one to replace it, a 1 min task and make sure it’s on the firmware model list allowed for that thinkpad unless you want to also modify the EFI image, which isn’t bad as well because Intel Management Engine is probably on it and that’s a giant back door no one talks about. tl;dr celluar modem? who cares.