My phone has an operating system that mostly pretends that it's a mainframe. With just a little hardware, I could hook some circa 1978 VT100s up to it and a team of average *nix web backend developers could even be productive.
My "workstation" pretends to be several tens of machines doing all sorts of different things. These boundaries exist for no reason other than to map to organizational concerns -- my CPU does all kinds of computational gymnastics so I can "keep things tidy".
The model is just wrong. Things are immutable that shouldn't be. Things are mutable that shouldn't be. Things aren't distributed that should be. Things aren't durable that should be. Things are shared that shouldn't be. Things are isolated that shouldn't be. Config management, containers, orchestration, stuff like adding BPF to the kernel, Docker, Hadoop, Mesos -- all very cool, but all very much bandaids.
We're working on it but because we're human we can't go straight for the goalpost, we have to play politics, cheat by modeling the future using what we already have today and lead by example.