I think everybody cares about high DPG typography, they just rarely have a choice in the matter. If you ask Joe bloggs on the street to choose the more readable text that they'd prefer between a display from 2001 and 2010 they'll choose the 2010 one every time. Nobody sells a cutting edge laptop with a lower screen resolution, so it's never a choice somebody has to make, so nobody really knows it's a thing, explicitly.
I'm only relying on memory, but I don't think screen resolutions on high-end personal computers improved significantly between 2001 and 2010, even as drastic improvements were seen in smaller devices such as phones. The reason is that large screens with higher resolutions mean even more pixels, and a higher likelihood that one of them will fail during the manufacturing process, resulting in significant numbers of faulty screens that have to be discarded. So it wasn't seen as economically viable to increase screen resolutions much beyond 150 ppi or so.
We are only just starting to see higher ppis in bigger devices (retina macbooks, high ppi tablets, limited ultrabooks).
But even the difference between a 13" laptop and 15" laptop is noticeably crisper when directly compared at the same resolution (1366x768 in recent years).
Even going from an older 1680x1050 22" monitor to a 16:9 1920x1080 is a somewhat noticeable difference.
However when you aren't comparing directly, or switching from one to the other, it is hard to see the clarity improvement.
Looking at a 22" monitor from a retina display makes the fonts look blurry and off but if you start working on that monitor at the beginning of the day it isn't quite so bad.
Yes, as far as ppis on bigger devices, it feels like there has been much more progress in the past couple of years than in the decade preceding them. The difference is certainly noticeable in direct comparison, though most consumers are not likely to notice except in cases such as poorly hinted text.
