In principle this could be true but I don't think it will be. A simply example: right now speech recognition happens in the cloud. Could be that a future device has a dedicated chip for speech recognition (or some kind of preprocessing). Then future versions of the OS will require this. Hence you have to upgrade.
This is how it has gone with things like graphics, animation, even sound. In principle the core elements of the Mac OS don't require extremely fast chips/hardware ... but once you get into the fancy desktop animations, the sound processing, face recognition (e.g. iPhoto), etc etc, you require fancier hardware.
There are still lots of directions for Apple to push their software, directions that will be aided by better and/or more specialized hardware.
If all you need is a text editor, an email client and some CPU power for crunching spreadsheets then for sure, all you "need" is a desktop circa 2000 (or even earlier ...) ... but if you want to run the latest OS, even if you don't need/want all the features of that latest OS, you need to keep up with the hardware.
Never mind games.