... so even with Moore's Law, dedicated desktop is always going to be more powerful than laptop, and laptop is going to be more powerful than this.
I agree, but I think it's a matter of what's acceptably powerful enough. At the risk of holding up anecdotes as data, I know some people who pretty much just use their phones and iPads (v2); maybe we've hit a point where these devices are powerful enough for a non-trivial segment of the market?
I'd say there's no maybe about it, in terms of raw power. A half-decent phone is more powerful than my high-end laptop of six or seven years ago, which is itself still fairly usable by most people's standards.
The only thing I see even remotely challenging to these devices is the fact that laying out a web page is a legitimately complicated algorithm, which we've secretly been pouring more and more processing power into over the years. Other than that these things have more than enough power for anything most people want today. There's a class of applications coming in the augmented reality domain and such that people will want more power for tomorrow, but they can buy that power tomorrow at tomorrow's price's.
I agree, but I think it's a matter of what's acceptably powerful enough. At the risk of holding up anecdotes as data, I know some people who pretty much just use their phones and iPads (v2); maybe we've hit a point where these devices are powerful enough for a non-trivial segment of the market?