I have always considered that a "laboratory" in Aurora actually represents a large set of research infrastructure including various institutes, user facilities, server farms, universities and other educational institutions, and others all of which might be grouped purely as an administrative unit or might be earmarked to support a flagship facility - ITER, LHC, and so on. All of course highly abstracted, with your "scientist" really being the head of a quite large research division or department. I think this is generally the best way to look at planetary facilities in Aurora, not as single discrete units but rather as reflecting the infrastructure in place to direct the efforts of the employed population towards the goals of your space empire - which can then be shipped around to the desired colonies to direct the efforts of the entire space empire, an important element in a game which has space logistics at its heart I would say.
I will agree that it is quite unrealistic to have labs be hot-swapped at a moment's notice, but frankly it is the same issue we have with construction factories so it is not unique to labs. We could in principle implement some kind of "retooling" mechanic for labs, factories, etc. but while I don't think this would be a "bad" mechanic I do think it is not well-suited for Aurora. It adds simulationism, but not really interesting decisions besides forcing a particular style of gameplay - what I mean by this is that it does force the player to "intelligently" set their industrial or research priorities and only change them slowly, but this doesn't actually add any mechanical depth to the game as the player is only incentivized to make a change when their hand is forced by the game situation. The economic depth of mechanics is not enough that a game of micromanaging the economic balance is really engaging.
IMO the mechanics work best as they are, as far as Aurora works, because the flexibility while it may not be the "most realistic" allows freedom of roleplay while maintaining good balance of gameplay. For those who want a very specific style of play Aurora has always offered great flexibility to create house rules to model whatever we want.