My prediction is that is exactly what we'll be doing in a couple years. Smart phone processors are getting fast enough to be a primary computer for the average user. Why have separate devices when a smart phone and an external monitor/keyboard is all you need?
IBM had a demo of something like this about 10 years ago IIRC, where you dropped your PDA into a dock and your session/files were instantly available.
Steve jobs also talked about this in a round table at an WWDC where he talked about having access to "home" anywhere you went. this became iCloud. probably for apple the step holding up the process is that it cuts out the beloved Mac in the middle. a thunderbolt display powered by iphone or iPad could be insanely great
The atrix was the first phone that recognized that use case - but the suits at motorola made it prohibitively expensive to own the dock (costed as much as the phone itself) that made this possible.
Here's the problem I see - the docking system that needs to be standardized. The ARM Mali T658 GPU promises PS3 quality... and there are better chips (Tegra 4, Adreno, etc.) on the way. The Atrix leverages the HDMI+microusb because of the way it designed them to fit into the slots into its dock.
Theoretically, you could use the Adreno dock with other phones, but they dont have the ports placed in the same way (to lock into the dock).
I think with Google's philosophy of open-ness, it is too much to expect the creation of a new dock standard. I'm not sure if HDMI (or the displayport equivalents) can carry serialized mouse signals in addition to display... but somehow the ports need to be standardized before we have a hope of leveraging hardware that will be equipped to play Crysis by 2012.
And that will be a shame - all that power and unable to use it. Almost as frustrating Skype not using most Android phones' front camera towards video calls for a long time.
