...and thence to i3, i5, and i7.

We upgraded their graphics cards from Intel's 945 chipset to separate GeForce cards, and put Gbit network cards in their PCs.

They worked on XP, which they loved, gave up on Vista, and with huge gratitude migrated to Win7. They got used to 256 MB, then 512, now all of a sudden 2 GB isn't enough. They filled a 20 GB hard drive, then a 60, a 120, and now if you don't give them a 750 they look down their noses at you.

And now you want to wind them all the way back to something slower than an Atom processor, with less than 384 MB of memory (?don't know where I got that from, I can't get my Android to tell me how much RAM it has), maybe 20 GB of storage (some of it on slow external SDCard), a stripped-down version of Linux, and slower responses than a 1986 IBM XT? And this is going to be an *important part* of the computing landscape in the near future?

I agree with Vulpine, it's all a new romance. At the moment it's cool to open a PDF on your phone, pinch it bigger, and flick it around on the screen while you try to read it. But pretty soon the lust affair will cool, the hormones will dial back a couple of notches, and all those starry-eyed lovers will start realising their new paramours have buck teeth, crossed eyes, and bad breath. Even the best smartphone, Apple's, is not fast enough to be a serious, even a meaningful computer. I can't speak for the Windows phone, but my Galaxy SII is sometimes so slow to respond I want to throw the thing into the river - and that's just while using it for basic phone functions like calling and looking up phone nos. I can't imagine waiting for those kind of response times while editing a document, I would go batsh!t crazy.

No, sorry, "IT professionals", I think it's a lot of wishful thinking - unless in the next year Silicon Valley can come up with a 10-fold performance improvement while doubling battery life, I can't see this prediction coming true. Heaven knows, I'd love it to be true, but I don't think so.