> Perhaps not for the Hacker News audience.
I'd say especially for the HN audience.
A lot of people around here live most of their lives in the terminal, using Vi and Git. They have no reason to work on a beefy machine, as long as they can access more hardware somewhere else. It could be a server in the closet, or "the cloud".
When I bought my first laptop and started doing webdev in 2001, I noticed that all I needed was enough power to play music, edit text and run a web/database server. It worked great with win2k WAMP on a P2 266 MHz, 96 MB, 4 GB. My much more powerful desktop was suddenly left powered off most of the time.
In fact the only total, absolute, complete deal breaker is Cmd+Tab instead of reaching for the home button+screen.
Perhaps not for the Hacker News audience. I'd assert that an iPad -- perhaps with a bluetooth keyboard -- is already enough computer for 70% of western world.