See, I know that, but what I don't understand is how you're getting from "are becoming popular" to "are totally going to replace PCs for the average user."
Because it's a trend that shows no sign of ending. The lifestyle PC form factors such as the all in one by the iMac and the EeeTops is one that better fits into a home than some honking great tower. And these days they have more than enough processing and graphics power to do just about anything you'd want. Many of these all in ones also come with touch screens along with keyboards.
How many people who have a tablet don't have a PC in their home?
And how many of those have as their PC a lifestyle all in one system such as an iMac?
As with the netbooks, it's likely these things will be used as satellite systems, at least for the foreseeable future.
Something you can have laying around your house that you can quickly access to look up something or check over things.
And while a low-power keyboardless portable device will probably work just fine for most of an average user's typical leisure computing, how many of them (teenagers with large amounts of disposable income excepted) don't have a few text-intensive or processor-intensive (by tablet standards) tasks that they need to take care of (e-mail, budget tracking, 3D gaming, etc.)?
Many of these lifestyle pcs come with fairly beefy cpus and gpus that are more than up for light gaming. Even the low end ones, with the exception of gaming would be more than capable of the rest.
But there is a convergence in form factors between lifestyle PCs and tablets.
Certainly the hardware is becoming ever more capable and I wouldn't be surprised if at some point someone offers up a tablet which from the start offers up a docking station and keyboard so it can effectively offer both. The only question then is the size of the tablet, too big and it fails in terms of portability and battery life, too small and you're going to hurt yourself trying to use it as a desktop machine.
Fifteen years ago or so I saw the libretto as a massively pricey toy. Who on earth would use it for serious work? Today I can pick up a netbook with a dual core atom with or without nvidias ION2 chipset for about a quarter of the price and it's capable of doing everything I use day to day. Same for a dualcore lifestyle pc and in the very near future probably tablets as well.
What you're likely going to see at some point is someone offering an end to end solution that offers up on one side a lifestyle PC or maybe a tablet with a nas come router that is hidden away out of sight in the home that has all your storage. Everything such as your desktop, laptop/tablet would then sync in wirelessly or stream off larger stuff locally held on the nas.
My money is on Apple. But even today you could set one up if you had the technical know how.
However, I don't see them completely supplanting full-fledged PCs (laptop or desktop) for anybody other than pre-adults who spend a lot of time on YouTube and Flash games.
They won't in their current guise. But don't underestimate how much technology can evolve over even a short span of time.
And it seems that someone was paying attention to your complaint about
tablet keyboards.
