Looking at the specs of a standard netbook:
- Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz
- 1GB DDR/DDR2 RAM
- varying HDD size
- integrated graphics
It seems to be a fairly powerful computer for most common usages (except Vista perhaps).

Desktops have the edge over laptops in terms of performance/price ratio, performance ability (and extensibility).  However, the question becomes, how much power do you really need?  Take out gaming and various multimedia applications and perhaps some specialist applications - there's very little that requires a lot of computing power, in fact, today's netbook can probably do it fairly efficiently (ie word processing, web browsing etc).

Cast a few years ahead, and netbooks may be able to handle a number of these multimedia applications reasonably well, I mean, your average to high end notebook should already be able to do these fairly reasonably (though they may be a bit more on the expensive side).
I'm finding my current computer specs more than what I really need actually, and am considering whether my next upgrade should still be a desktop.  Although portability isn't a big issue, it's still a plus if you don't need the amount of computing power.

Gaming is perhaps still the main thorn in notebooks, though I think if the market for notebooks increases significantly, solutions may come out.  I believe ATI had an "XGP" solution where you connected a graphics card to the notebook externally, though this was a little while ago, and its current status is unknown.


Do you think laptops will slowly take over the desktop market, or do people still want the most computing power they can get?