The interesting thing is going to be the potential for "free as in speech" hardware. Before the problem was that hardware was vertically integrated. If you wanted a state of the art processor you had to use a design from a company with a state of the art fab because nobody else had the resources and inclination to update their design for every new process node.

If we get to the point that TSMC has the same technology as Intel and IBM and it never changes then some hardware hackers will eventually publish something like a 250MHz processor that uses 10 watts on that process, which will be "good enough" for some embedded devices to justify a fairly large production run. Then you have a community and people make incremental design improvements for the same reasons Google and others do for Linux and in a few years the free hardware design is above 2GHz and below one watt.