Charlie Stross, one of my favorite living scifi writers has a prognostication piece on the future of the PC industry that is among best tech analysis I've seen anywhere. He starts with this:

I've got a theory, and it's this: Steve Jobs believes he's gambling Apple's future — the future of a corporation with a market cap well over US $200Bn — on an all-or-nothing push into a new market. HP have woken up and smelled the forest fire, two or three years late; Microsoft are mired in a tar pit, unable to grasp that the inferno heading towards them is going to burn down the entire ecosystem in which they exist. There is the smell of panic in the air, and here's why ...

and ends here:

If you're using an iPad in 2015, my bet is that you won't bother to have home broadband; you'll just have data on demand wherever you are. You won't bother yourself about backups, because your data is stored in Apple's cloud. You won't need to bother about software updates because all that stuff will simply happen automatically in the background, without any fuss: nor will worms or viruses or malware be allowed. You will, of course, pay a lot more for the experience than your netbook-toting hardcore microsofties — but you won't have to worry about your antivirus software breaking your computer, either. Because you won't have a "computer" in the current sense of the word. You'll just be surrounded by a swarm of devices that give you access to your data whenever and however you need it.

In between he weaves a great story around Apple's ridiculous gestapo-esque policies regarding what software can run on their devices and what they do to people who reveal their secrets, why Flash is abhored on the iDevices, and what 4G data networks will really mean for the world at large. It's as good as any of his books and while he may not have all of the details quite right, I think he paints in broad strokes how the PC era will truly end for consumers, and what the cloud one will entail.