quote: Its now within the realm of possibility to do a lot of serious work on a tablet or even a phone. A few more years from now, I would not be surprised to see these tablets completely overtaking traditional PC use.

How does this keep coming up?

A major revolution in UI design for mobile devices -- including something better than touchscreens for the actual physical UI -- will be necessary for us to see "tablets completely overtaking traditional PC use." The current mobile UI paradigm is quite simply inferior in a major way to more traditional UIs for critical tasks like composing business documents, dealing with numbers, and . . . well, basically every task that makes up the core of an office worker's job. Until we can match the efficiency, flexibility, and power of the keyboard-and-mouse input interfaces, we're stuck with "traditional PC use." Even the absurd notion that docking stations will somehow replace the "traditional PC" won't help, because the major benefit of mobile computing is that you do not have hardware tied to specific locales -- and docking stations just give you a way to feel just as constrained when you want to get real work done, but the tablets you'd use with those docking stations provide the added bonus of greatly reduced computing power. A much more likely scenario is either of:

1. seamless syncing of certain subsets of working data between a tablet and a workstation system or two at endpoints where real work gets done

2. laptops that double as tablets without being particularly more bulky than current tablets