That's where the whole world is headed. As a general consumer, why have a desktop when you can dock your phone/tablet and playback or stream videos, edit content and browse the web?
Well, because it's annoying to constantly have to dock your phone in order to use the desktop, for one thing.
What are the upsides here?
Synchronised calendar, user accounts, data, everything? You can do that without sharing the hardware. (Much harder to do it without relying on the internet, admittedly.)
Less maintenance because you don't have to worry about two devices?
Cost efficiency because you don't have to pay for a standalone computer? I suppose that's the big one, and I guess it's good enough. Then again, you could just get something like a Raspberry Pi for not much money. And if you need a dock, that won't be free, either.
Don't get me wrong, I see the potential, but I'm not sure it's where the world is headed. I guess it will be one of a large number of modes in which people use computers with displays larger than tablets.
Hmm. 12 to 15 years ago most laptop owners also had a desktop machine. Since then most of those users have gone laptop-only despite the fact that many (most?) of them face a similar annoyance to the one you give: they either dock their laptop when at their desk or they plug in an external monitor.
You can point out (correctly, IMO) that there were no truly satisfactory ways to sync laptop and desktop back when laptop-desktop owners went laptop-only, and I suppose you would claim that sync will work better this time because vendors and users "get the cloud" now. Hmm. Any laptop users who also run a desktop care to chime in on how annoying it is in the age of Dropbox to keep data on the two devices in sync?
Absolutely, except minus the dock and right now. If you have an apple TV you can already mirror your iPhone 4S, iPad 2, or Mac (with Mountain Lion) to the display with airplay. It's pretty neat, especially considering the quality of games hitting the phone (such as GTA3). I think there's a whole slew of apps that could be made (right now) to transform this paradigm into something all consumers use instead of just the technically adventurous.
I think that's exactly where they're heading. Apple filed for a patent a couple of years ago for an iMac style enclosure that could dock a tablet computer. It probably makes more sense to do this via a tablet instead of a phone.
