I confess, I hadn't finished reading the original article when I posted my previous comment so I was operating under the assumption that ARM single-core perform

I confess, I hadn't finished reading the original article when I posted my previous comment so I was operating under the assumption that ARM single-core performance was significantly further from parity than it apparently is. My original objection was that an external GPU can't shield you from lag and unresponsiveness in normal, everyday (ie. not designed to take advantage of GPU compute) software, but if the single core performance delta between an A12 and a reasonably recent desktop i7 is genuinely only 20% then that's not an issue.