I wouldn't say that ACPI is only useful on portable computers. I think the main advantage it confers is that it virtually eliminates the possibility that the system will become IRQ-bound (not having enough IRQs to support all the devices a user wishes to run simultaneously). I think of the actual power conservation benefits as being nice side-effects.
A lot of people, particularly hardware junkies who have been used to juggling devices and IRQs to suit themselves, seem to go into shock when they poke around in Device Manager under W2K and see a half-dozen or a dozen devices camped out on the same IRQ. The fact is that the real interrupt load is being handled by virtual IRQs, and the IRQ listed for multiple devices in the Device Manager is just a sort of "traffic cop". Anyway, a lot of these people panic or start bad-mouthing Microsoft whenever a device or devices on their systems start acting like crap. The real problem, of course, is that there's a bad device driver or two in the mix somewhere. It's the vendor of that non-compliant device / device driver who deserves the cussing, not Microsoft. Or it's possibly the user's fault for not having bothered to check the HCL to see if the devices s/he is trying to use with W2K are compliant with the OS. And I've even seen some people who wanted to go ahead and disable ACPI / install the standard PC HAL when there was nothing wrong with the way the system was performing in the first place! Many of them claim that their system's performance improves when they do this. I'll believe it's possible, but only in cases where there was a buggered device driver or two present in the first place.
Maybe it's just a matter of philosophy, but I'd say that disabling ACPI is best viewed as a temporary workaround to be used until you can get the device vendors to support their products properly or until you can replace the errant devices. I can't believe that choosing to run a standard PC HAL on a fully compliant system under W2K is a wise decision.
My $.02.
Regards,
Jim