In your last point you touch on something important - do we need a rich digital UI for everything? Is the dryer that has essentially an Android tablet embedded

In your last point you touch on something important - do we need a rich digital UI for everything? Is the dryer that has essentially an Android tablet embedded in it superior to the two knobs and a button my current one has? (And of that, I use 10% of my options.) Do I need yet finer control? I only have so much attention to give; no interface is more appealing to me. An appliance can be "smart" without having the trappings of computers, I hope. And likewise, do we need an Internet connection in order for the object to be smart? If context awareness is the name of the game, there's quite a bit you can glean by being a physical object with a memory of how it's used, and beyond that, a local network. The Drift lightbulb is interesting because it adds some smarts to a dumb object but doesn't add more I/O - it still uses a light switch and an LED bulb, and it isn't trying to get on the network. There are computers that are taking on the form factor of a light bulb, and there are light bulbs that are taking on the force multiplier of a computing device. The latter philosophy needs to be explored more.