>> hauling a Mac mini between work and home

Have done that for 3 straight years without a hitch. Yes, you might feel the weight a bit, but the only time I had to carry it was from home to home parking and office parking to cubicle.

For portability (think making presentations in a conf room), I would just have Screen Sharing & Remote access enabled. Worked fine.

I used Carbon Copy Cloner for bootable backups to 2 disks, the second disk being my bootable volume for the Air. When traveling and updating my Air volume, I would just use Chrono Sync to sync my home folders on the mini and the Air.

This was at my earlier workplace, and hope this helps.