Hell, with commercial printers from the likes of Konica Minolta, the print quality for text is better than offset print.

Most POD presses actually use inkjet because it's less expensive. The result is much lower quality.

> Laser print quality today is on par with printing plates/offset printing, especially for just text.

Why do you claim that so confidently, when many people say otherwise? Are you just going off some metric like DPI?

You're probably missing things like a sibling comment mentioned: "professionally printed books for example use slightly gray letters on creme paper." I don't think you could get "slightly gray" with a laser printer, and print-on-demand seems to basically use bright-white office paper (probably for reasons of laziness and cheapness).