I've been very interested in #2 on http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html for a long time. I always thought that a sufficiently simple, unbreakable operating system constitutes a solution to the problem, especially combined with a homepage enabling basic access to 3 or 4 separate tasks.

I am optimistic that Google Chrome OS constitutes an absolutely enormous step towards #2 by building the actual Web OS -- which is more like the Palm Pre's OS than any other existing operating system. But I won't know if it actually works until it actually comes out, probably a few days to 2 weeks before YC apps are due, because Google usually launches about a week before Microsoft and Windows 7 comes out then.