Make the chumby into a sleek, passively charged thinclient and you could have something that might compete in the ipad space as a home internet appliance. Make sure you have stuff like a camera, mic, touch screen, accelerometer, decent speakers and you have a lot of possibilities (it sits somewhere and displays a slideshow/clock/widgets, you pick it up and you could take skype calls or video chat directly with another networked device, record something and have it saved on the main pc, etc) The key though would be to make it cheap enough so that you could buy several and network them together in a household/office environment.

The new Chumby makes me think of the monitor Riker and Picard used in TNG. I shall make me a captains chair as soon as I can get a chumby.