Actually Intel's ultrabook rebranding was also a clever step to make laptops expensive/more profitable again, while they were in a free spiral fall due to (Taiwan's)Acer's netbooks. That said, hardware will only be dead if US companies give up on producing hardware, and it becomes commodity produced elsewhere, similar to clothing manufactured; only Apple will remain the Prada of hardware.
Add a keyboard(/trackpad?) case to one of these 7" tablets and you pretty much get the original Asus netbook concept, only faster, cheaper, and more versatile.
And if you remember the CeBIT where ASus abortively introduced an ARM based laptop you got to see the who ecosystem in action. I wish the full details of that came out but the scuttlebutt was that Microsoft threatened to cut off Asus completely if they shipped it. They were already pissed that the EeePC's had a Linux distro that was easy enough for windows users to use but couldn't really put Vista on them, their re-issue of XP to support those machines was pretty notable.
I have a NATPC009S with a $10 USB keyboard/carrying case and it works great for what it is. Not in any way an iPad (or Google Nexus) competitor of course, but at a fraction of the price it's perfect as a "won't worry if this breaks/gets lost" device thrown in my bag for casual use coupled with emergency ssh access when a server goes down.
