my gripe with the 'SB-indignant gamers' is that they think everybody should care more about GPU than CPU.
i care more about CPU than GPU.
the point is, we all have different needs and mine are not, for some mysterious reason, the correct, universal ones.
i could care less what the Air is designed and marketed for. you would also tell me the Air was not designed for processing power. no, its not currently, but Sandy Bridge may well completely change that.
wanting more from technology is what drives innovation. there's nothing wrong with that, it's the name of the game. it's the reason the Air exists at all, (though here we wanted 'less').
and i think you're wrong about the Air users, at least on MR. it sometimes seems like they're ALL gamers, ready to sacrifice almost anything to the 'fps' gods!
From what I've seen of the MR crowd, they are primarily power-users, or those who consider themselves as such. These are people for whom pushing their machines to the limit is the norm. People who are generally in the upper 5% of tech-savvy consumers. In other words, my kind of people.
So yes, I agree with your statement that the MR crowd seems to include many gamers and other GPU-centric individuals.
The problem is, those folks are indeed a smaller percentage of the whole market. You rarely see non-techie consumers on these pages, and if you do, they're generally asking for advice.
Threads such as this fall outside the realm of "imagine your perfect unicorn-type computer." In a mythical world, we could stick that GT540M discrete in an 11" machine rocking 32GB RAM, full 1080p resolution, and a 5GHz hexa-core CPU. But having unrealistic expectations does not drive innovation (okay, maybe once in a while it does).
Generally speaking, the innovation we've seen over the last several decades in the computer world have been driven by optimization. x86 is how old now? Compare our i7's of today to the Pentiums of yesteryear. Ostensibly, these are extremely similar architectures (great-grandfather:great grand-son, as it were); in fact, modern x86 CPUs can natively run a lot of Pentium-era code. What we have is the product of hundreds/thousands/millions of small, innovative changes that have resulted in an unrecognizable product to an early 90's-era Pentium user.
Why does it matter how Apple markets a product? Because it is likely those are the factors they will consider when designing updates. I have no problem with utilizing hardware for other than its "intended purpose"; I just feel like users should not be indignant when changes and updates follow a predictable, practical, and understandable path. The reality of the situation is that if Apple moves in the direction it seems to be indicating, GPU updates will likely not be a priority when optimizations to battery life, heat reduction, and maybe even feature-sets are available.
