Of all the possible future of computing devices, one that seems so appealing—superficially, at least—is a single converged gadget that
does it all. A pocketable thing that gives you computing and Internet connectivity when you're out and about, but it's equally capable of driving a big-screen monitor, mouse, and keyboard when you're sitting at a desk doing some work, watching streaming media, or playing a game on your TV.
This is, I would argue, the future that Microsoft is driving at. Microsoft has long maintained that
tablets are PCs: that a computing device is a computing device, and that it should support many different kinds of input devices and applications. A device's role should be defined by how it's being used at any moment in time, rather than its role being an essential characteristic of the device.