Maybe someone can explain to me how paying for software by the hour over all the years I plan to use it, instead of just once, is an improvement for me, but I doubt it. It will cost me more: it always does (reference: car leases vs purchasing, apartment rentals vs. home mortgages, etc).

Maybe someone will work out a business plan whereby a company hosts and rents a metric crapton of application servers to users. Maybe they use generic computer sharing technology like Remote Desktop, and just grit their teeth when the user wants to play an on-demand movie. But even in the mystical land of plenty where network transmission speeds can cope with fullscreen uncompressed video streaming, there will =always= be network latency — and =any= latency will make a net-based emulator slower than a machine sitting on my desk. And that’s not even bringing full-on lag spikes into the picture — another phenomenon which will not ever go away.

So no, I don’t think I agree with you. I can see it being a niche, perhaps a sizeable one: dumb terminals with rentable applications for users who do no more than letters to their family, surf the web and play casual flash games. But for Taking Over the World of Computing — especially from the perspective of anyone who ekes even a smidgen of performance out of their hardware — not an option.