ROTFLMAO.
You're hitting 400 today.
Steve, unfortunately, IS the machine from 1984. He's a megalomaniac who has had some serious success over the years. This means he also has talent. But at some point all megalomaniacs lose touch with reality and start veering off in directions that are either bizarre or the world isn't ready for yet.
The idea of ditching physical media WILL one day make sense. When
everyone has 10Giga-bit per second Internet connections you'll be able to download a 10GB OS in all of 8 seconds. Even Super-Blu-Ray type resolutions will be stored and played with ease over networks and mega-storage, etc. There will be no point in having physical media. You will probably have a basic browser/bootable OS in a chip type option that will let you boot back into the Net and repair/fix your computer with ease at that point if something goes wrong. You won't need a backup disc or a boot disc. It'll be in hardware and be standard operating procedure for any computer.
The problem in 2011 is that no such setup exists and some poor people are still using god-awful dial-up or some slow 1Mpbs broadband that just doesn't cut it for huge downloads and restores, etc. Steve's idea has some merit in the future, but he's too busy trying to cram it down our throats 20 years in advance to notice that future isn't quite here yet. If he had the common sense to include TODAY'S technologies (e.g. Blu-Ray for one) for NOW and offer tomorrow's as an OPTION (i.e. download it off the App store if you have the bandwidth or want to), then everything would be OK. But it's his megalomaniac personality that has decided he wants to do it FIRST and be the FIRST to rid himself of physical media, etc. Well hooray for Steve Jobs, but he's not listening to his customers.
This will work well for iOS devices, especially ones with 3G setups that will always have access to the Net almost anywhere, but it's a bit laborious for a huge desktop OS in 2011. I've got 10mbps so it wouldn't take that long to update to Lion here, but that doesn't mean I want to jump through hoops in case of a hard drive failure. Notice how Lion has a basic browser mode without even logging in. I'm guessing Steve will eventually realize he can put that in a re-writable flash memory chip and let that connect to the App store directly and restore without the primary OS even being needed to do it. THAT would fix the problem for new computers, but it means that older computers wouldn't have it and so until those models are DITCHED (Steve likes to do this anyway), physical media is still needed for older models without creating a "use SL discs and THEN update" kind of crap.
Steve doesn't care about business and never has (except his own, of course). He's left that AND the gaming market to Windows. It's sad, really, because the Mac could have been great in those markets too, but a megalomania cannot allow others to have that much control and so Steve would rather limit what Apple does than give others enough power to handle those markets themselves. And THAT is Apple's greatest failing. But with Apple making money hand-over-foot lately NO ONE SEEMS TO CARE except us Mac fans that realize the Mac OSX proper market got the shaft when the iPhone started development. THAT is when OSX started getting slower instead of faster and development time increased (and now gets little tiny crappy updates that are little more than an excuse to dump hardware support). Steve is obsessed with iOS and he's left the Mac to essentially ROT.