I think that compute power moving towards commodity status would be a great thing, however, I also think there's one big problem that needs to be surmounted at

I think that compute power moving towards commodity status would be a great thing, however, I also think there's one big problem that needs to be surmounted at present: bandwidth isn't free. Practically speaking, to be properly fungible, it should be possible to move compute workloads across the 'Net into whatever environment happens to be cheapest. But for anything being done with large amounts of data, there's a non-negligible cost to moving that data across the Internet, and this in turn can lead to things like lock-in. In fact one could argue that it's almost the only form of lock-in practiced by AWS. On the other hand, if compute power DOES become a commodity, that would be great, because then Jevons paradox would probably kick in, which could itself lead to true ubicomp etc. One can dream :-)