Well, (theoretically) it's about time
It's pretty trivial to rig a battery so that the thermal runaway reaction occurs on demand. We have all kinds of devices that do this (hoverboards, Samsung Note 7) that do this DESPITE the safeguards in place to prevent that from happening. Disable the safeguards and you have a bomb without the explosive residue that are typical of other bombs. To that end, I'd ban cell phones with removable batteries too, as some of these phablets (like the Note 7) have relatively large batteries. Or I'd at least visually inspect all cell phones to see if they've been tampered with.
As far as the argument that everything is scanned, it is done so poorly that they may as well not scan at all. The TSA's positive detection rate is a pitiful 5%.
Business travelers are going to complain, and rightly so. If you're paranoid about somebody hacking into your laptop, take out the hard drive and carry it with you. If you're worried about damage or theft, don't bring it and put the data/presentation on a USB stick. Or ship a notebook PC to your destination ahead of time. Also, I'm sure the company you're traveling to has a competent IT department and can loan you a notebook PC when you arrive (our IT department does this quite a bit).
Don't get me wrong, this whole thing is still silly because it's easy to circumvent. You can rig your PC to explode in the cargo hold when it receives a signal from your cell phone. Or put it on a timer. You can book two separate flights (but that might raise a red flag). And I don't think the risk of an intentional explosion is greater than the risk of an unintentional explosion.
But I thought that it was silly to ban all liquids when rechargeable batteries were the bigger theoretical threat. I thought they'd start letting liquids back onto planes, but this idiotic administration went the OTHER way (no surprise).