You can also boot a live Linux on the laptop and either create the image to an external drive or tunnel it via ssh or even just netcat it to your Linux device. No need to open up the laptop just to create a 1:1 image with dd that you then turn into an image for use in a VM.

I don’t see why this use-case needs a special distribution?

I have Arch installed alongside Ventoy on a thumb drive with all firmware packages on luks encrypted partitions. I keep it in sync with my other computers in terms of dotfiles, configs, packages so I can boot my usual environment on any PC.

As long as all references to partitions are UUIDs (fstab) or by-uuid block device paths it just works and I don’t see why you couldn’t do that with any other Linux distribution.

It’s right on the page you linked? You have to pay for it.

Free tier says it’s cloudflare branded and only recommended for small hobby projects.