This may be true for some fields, but it's certainly not true for all fields. I'd be surprised if there are still orders-of-magnitude improvements to be discove

This may be true for some fields, but it's certainly not true for all fields. I'd be surprised if there are still orders-of-magnitude improvements to be discovered for BLAST, for example, and that's a foundational component of modern biology. I should have spoken more generally to OP's point though. What I was really hoping to get at is that there are applications other than games that require non-trivial amounts of compute, and speeding them up would make meaningful differences in their users' lives.