Where it's going
Where the industry is going is that the smartphone is going to become your computer. It will initially dock for a desktop like the Ubuntu phone, and later will dock into a laptop shell if portability is needed. Eventually, we may dock into another OS. This is already possible by booting from a flash drive, or just switching to that OS from what is running.
This will start in china, where people will see the wisdom of not needing to purchase a computer and a smartphone. It will spread like wildfire into India as well. And then to other second world countries where Internet penetration is still less than 20% among adults.
Intel now has the processors to do this. Ubuntu will have the operating system in the fall, it is already released to developers. These chips are fast enough that they will be able to run emulators so all the fanboys can run their iOS applications until they get cloned for Ubuntu. intel has already paid Samsung to include an Atom chip in a tablet. This will be the last opportunity for intel, as arm servers are being developed. The problem for intel, is that processors for smartphones only support a $50 profit, instead of the $100 intel needs to cover USA production costs. There is actually a glut of servers in the world, initial surveys showed that as many of 30% of the servers in server farms were doing nothing but consuming power and producing heat.
The only thing missing from the prototype of this concept is that the smartphone will become the trackpad/touchscreen for the computer.
The processor that is going to float to the top in this is the chip company that produces just one processor, one that can be customized with firmware to provide the functionality needed for the device, and the clock speed to meet the power requirements. Untold billions are spent on too many variations of chips, producing CPUs that all do exactly the same thing, to get functionality undetectable by the average user. The economies of scale of producing just one chip are phenomenal. IBM used to (maybe still does) do this with the power pc chips in the as/400. You wanted to upgrade to a faster model, you paid, the tech rep showed up, and changed the microcode and you had the faster model. The complete functionality was already there, from the desktop to the high end model.
And btw, I live in Ecuador, and there are NO laptops available for less than $700. The opportunity to give a student a smartphone, tablet and home computer for that price is simply to great to be missed.