First, thanks for the nice response. "Setting aside the fact that neither Dell nor HP actually make any of the parts inside their PCs now" I was referring to

First, thanks for the nice response. "Setting aside the fact that neither Dell nor HP actually make any of the parts inside their PCs now" I was referring to the whole device as a 'part', and don't really expect Dell or HP take over from Broadcom, TI, and so on. Anyone that sells a tablet could sell this. 1: Hopefully not. Ideally, hardware should perform well for the lifetime of the device, without having to swap out any of the internals. I gave up screwdrivers a few years ago. 2: I don't think I said smartphones... but you could use the slot to turn whatever it is into a phone, if you really need it. Personally, I will use something akin to Google voice or Skype over 802.11, but mobile data connections are fine. It needn't be bulky either -- the smaller express card form factor was nice, for instance. 3: Can you run your OS on Xen, etc.? Then everything will be fine. A good prototype device would run an AMI directly from your AWS account... a killer device would be able to expose exotic integrated hardware features when available, but it would be up to an OS to deal with it. Now, that's obviously more difficult, but not as difficult it was ten years ago. Point taken on the NFC example. In my world though, people only need to agree at the VM level.