The thing is, Thunderbolt manages to be this amalgamation of miniDP and PCIe x4. It is actually entirely possible to run PCIe devices on a thunderbolt connectio

The thing is, Thunderbolt manages to be this amalgamation of miniDP and PCIe x4. It is actually entirely possible to run PCIe devices on a thunderbolt connection, which means things like external graphics cards are now again viable (since almost no consumer computers have expresscard slots now).