The point is that we ought to have a permanent, immutable home for our personal computation that's universally available on the network. Not an app, not a service, but a general-purpose tool that I trust and can program. I have one on my desk, but I want one in the cloud that doesn't feel like flying a 747 (aka being a unix sysadmin).
Our approach is simple: the reason this doesn't exist is not because it's not a good idea, but because existing old-school system software is too complicated.