part of my phd dissertation was process migration for the desktop. I argued that MSFT or apple should make low powered portable devices (say phones/tablets) that were your computer, but could also be docked to more powerful computers. When docked, processes migrate off and run on the powerful hardware, when you want to undock, they migrate back.

when docked, the running gui apps switch to a keyboard/mouse optimized mode, and when undocked, they switched to a touch optimized mode.

I thought microsoft might have been heading in this direction with Windows 8 and the RT style apps, but instead of seeing it through they got gun shy and went back to more traditional style.