Brian if you are alluding to Windows Vista and Windows 7, Windows 7 is a "fixed" Vista. Yes, Microsoft screwed up with Vista and rushed it out, etc. People who were in charge of that aren't there any longer. Every company has made mistakes of this sort (iPhone 4 antenna issue? thats not as easily fixed as software) so its life. But the bottom line is Windows 7 is what Vista should have been; I think the biggest gripe I have about the situation is that my personal opinion is Vista users should have gotten free, or reduced, upgrades.
You can run Windows 7 on less than a dual core and 4GB of RAM. Netbooks do it; but you can go look and see the benefits/drawbacks of that. Win7, even Vista (although it has a memory hit with graphics due to the way it is doing buffering), scales back based on the hardware. Don't have graphics card for Aero? You get no Aero. Or you can go back to the previous windowing infrastructure. Official Win7 requirements are here:
http://windows.microsoft.com/systemrequirements.
Since computers are mainstream, any quality consumer level OS must protect the user from itself. Otherwise people are going to bitch and complain when they do stupid stuff and it breaks, loses files, corrupts their computer with viruses, etc, etc, etc. And they do anyways.
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I'm not saying Windows is better; I'm beginning to really dislike Windows and Microsoft's approach. They release a new OS before the previous one is fully fixed. To me, an OS is supposed to simply operate my system stably and with minimal resource hit. I shouldn't need a dual core CPU and 4GB of RAM just to run the OS decently. I think the processor and RAM requirements should be driven by what applications you run (gaming, video processing, etc), not by all the eye candy, fancy tricks, and making the OS so it protects the user from themselves.
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I highly doubt you are going to see drastic changes any time soon. There is always, and always had been (anyone remember nettops were going to take over the world?), predictions of this and that that will doom the status quo. Never comes to pass.
There is no doubt that portable devices are here to stay. And they are in their infancy as really useful, general, computation devices. Give me bluetooth keyboard, mouse and a wireless monitor (re Intel, et al), my Android smartphone and I could do my surfing, email, social communication, etc. in comfort on it without a desktop or even a laptop. Even more so with the next generation looking at better graphics chips, more memory and dual core processors. Anything more and you really start needing a laptop or desktop.
The new "tablets" are for tools who like to carry around multiple devices. I dislike it. At most I want my smartphone and a laptop (or tablet computer, depending on what I'm doing). I don't need to carry around a tablet too boot. They are a fad that, like the PDAs will morph into something else or disappear completely.
Win8 is already on its way. It is supposed to be supporting more of a virtualized environment, but there have been rumors as to how much or how little this will be. Still its not a hugely radical departure.
You might argue that ChromeOS is, but I think it will end up being a small bip on the radar before disappearing. One of the areas that it proports is online storage; this will probably stay although this really requires more/faster bandwidth (tiered pricing for wireless ain't going to help this) especially the upload to make it manageable. Personally I also require it be encrypted too boot. This online storage (not just of files but of your desktop/environment too) shows up to some extent on the Android; get a new android, just sync it to your google account and most of your apps and settings will get reset. But its also something, at least as far as the "desktop", has been talked about for Windows 8.
I have a google phone, use gmail (interface sucks), but don't use any of its other applications. Why? All substandard. Perhaps they get you buy for the basics, but for me they are slow, underperforming without enough features and options. And they all run in an interpreted language, Javascript. Now Google is working on a Javascript adaptive JIT compiler, but still, Javascript is not a high-end language; it just wasn't designed for it. And I'm not just trashing Google, but MS as well. Their "online" office suite just is no where near comparable to the normal version.
I suspect what will happen is that instead of either a) all thick client apps (Windows, Linux/Unix, MacOS/iOS, etc.) or thin client apps (web applications, Chrome OS) is that we will slowly transition to something in between. Your thick client apps will transition to a thinner client (next-gen Silverlight or such) that interacts with the services on the back-end to perform tasks, etc. You'll be able to buy these from an online store (i.e. amazon, etc) and they'll interact with your choice of online storage (i.e. the cloud). However, the front-end won't be a browser, it'll be a thinner client Virtual Machine (.NET/Silverlight, Java, Flash [although its really bad], etc.) that is built to give provide you with a rich experience. Essentially this is the next gen RIA. You'll still see thicker apps (i.e. games, multimedia) who require more resources, bandwidth, etc. and web-only apps like you do now. But it'll be a gradual transition more towards RIA-style apps for most things.
This is the approach MS took with Windows Phone 7; all the apps are done in Silverlight. So they are a small download that runs the UI locally but most of the application processing is done server side via WCF calls. I imagine we'll see more of that in Windows 8 too boot.
This was also one of the original goals of the iPhone.
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I think the way we compute is going to drastically change and I don't mean iPad's are the hero's either. I think the way we view OS's and the way they work will change as part of this. I just don't see a future for any system that locks itself down the way Apple does and even Windows will have to adjust to survive. In fact I wouldn't be surprised of Win7 is the last of it's type of OS for Microsoft
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