The price of a minimally speced Windows box keeps going down. So the portion of the price that is the OS keeps going up. I predict that eventually Microsoft will just give you a computer with each of copy of Windows. Oh, they already do that: it’s called the XBox!
Geek Rant dot org
Wasn’t that the whole idea of the Cell architecture or whatever? In fact it was taken even further so that you’d get a computer with every application you buy since supposedly you couldn’t pirate hardware (though I reckon people would work out how to extract the programs sooner or later). None the less, I think the idea for Microsoft was that each one would have Windows CE then the application would display on another computer through some wireless technology. Would probably find something on google/wikipedia anyway if you searched hard enough.