What's the future - how about instant on operating system which then hooks into the cloud for all of its applications and data?  What's interesting is that Google has released their future operating system to the public as an open source project called the Chromium OS.  The basis for the operating system is (1) cloud computing - everything is in the web - the hardware is simply the physical bridge to get you there; (2) security - all apps are ran on the server side with very little running on the device itself - in fact, upon startup the OS will determine if it itself is secure and if not will reload a new copy; (3) speed, speed, speed - bootup in seconds - access the cloud.