>It got me thinking--something similar happened to digital cameras where all the cheap point and shoots were replaced by phones so that now standalone cameras are an expensive niche for photographers.

exactly, I think it'll be better now to settle in with OpenPOWER rather than later to not get caught off guard. This whole affordable PC era was a temporary illusion and we can't relie on vendors providing us mitigations since even those eventually cease. Personally I still can't afford a Raptor machine atm but I'm getting in by working on stuff in QEMU with the recommended openPOWER debian release