Since it was just down the highway for him, J. D. Lasica attended IBM's New Paradigms for Using Computing conference. This was a small, invite only confab led by Daniel Russell, with whom Lasica snagged a five minute video interview. The main focus was on ultra-portable devices and mobile computing applications.
One thing I noted was the dismissal of the laptop as a mobile computing device. I'll grant that laptops are mainly nomadic, but they are fast approaching the signature consumer computing device. Desktops are so last century, and cell phones are for talking unless you're a bleeding edge geek or business person. And the combination of laptop portability with large (enough) screen real estate makes them decent, if not great, sociable devices.
More and more I'm seeing a laptop, (or two!), being a central element in student study group huddles. You know the scene in which 3-4 students commandeer a large table in a cafe or the library and hunker down for a few hours, books and papers spread everywhere.
To make a long story short, there's probably a lot of mileage in researching and engineering laptop technologies for the forseeable future. In my book, they're essentially the briefcase of the new millenium.