Exactly. Even with most of my stuff in the Google cloud, the cognitive overhead of going from my Note 2 to my Nexus 7 to my "real" laptop and (recently) to my Chromebook is annoying. I'd much rather have one device set up with all my stuff that automagically turns into the form factor I want, when I want it.
I don't know much about it but plan 9 had alot of interesting innovations in this field. I think the idea of it was to build a "UNIX out of a lot of little systems, not a system out of a lot of little UNIXes"
Old idea that has never taken off, and is probably less likely now that chips are really cheap. This graphic shows MCC’s Modular PC idea http://jkontherun.files.wordpress.com/2007/08/solutions_hq.j...
IBM's MetaPad was a similar idea.
Today, the Asus PadFone probably comes closest.
Yeah, the PadFone is quite attractive. If only they'd kept the Transformer-style keyboard dock from the original...
I'd much prefer to have a single trusted device than spread my digital life across "a cloud".