> I don't actually want another first-class computing device. I don't want it to persist state when I close it because I don't want a tablet to have state at all. I also don't want my phone to have state, nor my desktop PC. I want a singular state for all of my applications hosted on a compute server I operate.
I strongly disagree with this view unless you are talking about this server you operate being within your own office network. For anything outside the office/home having to rely on network access, if we are talking about business, simply isn't smart.
Traveling teaches this very quickly. You can't assume the network will be reachable when you need it. I've traveled extensively within the US, Europe and South America. Things are always getting better. However, if you are there on business and the files and data you need to access are critical to your mission you'd be well advised to not rely on being able to access the network.
I do agree that the idea of having, at the very least, a secure, centralized and reliably accessible data store would be fantastic. At the same time, there are huge holes in the viability of such an approach for a number of use cases. For example, applications such as SolidWorks, the Xilinx FPGA development suite or a number of 3D rendering/animation packages are not going to do very well if both the sometimes massive amount of data they require is remotely hosted. Running some of these applications over a remote desktop type environment (both app and data hosted remotely) just doesn't work very well at all.
If the opinion is that a tablet is simply a window into a server and nothing else things are very different. I am not sure that is the best use for the form factor. As an example, I am tending to purchase technical books in electronic form now rather than paper. As such, my iPad has now become my roving bookshelf. I don't have to worry about having network access in order to read any of my books. They are always there.
I've had a love/hate relationship with tablets. They are great for browsing the web, reading a book (although it is a far better experience on a multi-monitor desktop with large screens) and, yes, playing games. I have failed to identify any real work I can do on a tablet. A short email here and there, yes, anything more complex than that is a pain in the ass. Even sending a bunch of attachments with an email on an iPad is an absolute pain. Until the advent of Windows 8 (notice I did not say "Surface") I saw tablets as entertainment systems. Sure, there are verticals where they can and are being used in business. Cash registers, for example.
For me Windows 8 changed everything. Not that W8 is thrilling. I think they screwed up quite a few things. I was really critical of it at first. However, when you look at it in the context of a hybrid tablet/laptop machine you've arrived at almost the ideal business machine (or multi-use) paradigm in many ways. Nothing is more frustrating to me than trying to type on something like an iPad. It's crap. Even something as simple as cursor control for selection and editing is horrible. Not much work has gone into improving this. If you look at a W8 hybrid you, all of a sudden, have the possibility of operating it as a tablet for a bunch of use cases --from reading books and browsing the web to making presentations-- as well as switching to "real computer" mode to run Excel, Solidworks or anything else you care to. You can run desktop class software while having a tablet available if needed. I won't go as far as saying that is genius, but it is really neat.
The other thing W8 does is that it, to some extent, democratizes and liberates the tablet. Apple's choke-hold on the things you can and cannot do with their platform continues to baffle me. I fully understand it in the context of making a device that both grandma and an eight year old can use. No issues with that. If that's their market, that's their market. In exchange for that we can't even plug a USB drive into the thing and grab, move and access files as we see fit. A W8 tablet is simply running Windows, with all the access and flexibility that entails.
Having everything live on the cloud sounds great until a quarter of the country --every business, school, government office and home-- goes down because a cloud service provider had a major problem or one of the myriad of potential network problems causes a major outage.