Looking back on that era from here (only a handful of years later) it really looks like the desktop-is-dead-all-hail-the-smartphone crowd were just huffing pain

Looking back on that era from here (only a handful of years later) it really looks like the desktop-is-dead-all-hail-the-smartphone crowd were just huffing paint. And those fume hallucinations inspired the 'convergence' bandwagon which lead Canonical/Ubuntu, the Gnome project and Microsoft astray for years before they finally started rolling back those dumb decisions. The markets for smartphones and tablets are now at absolute saturation point and, to a first approximation, no-one is abandoning their laptops/desktops en-masse in favour of working off of a 6 inch screen.