I think you have to look at the needs of different groups of users.
You have business vs. home users. Gamers vs. Non-gamers (the need for ultrahigh speed and mem. for graphics and audio).
I'll restate what I said in an early post of mine. My PIII 800mhz 100fsb with 128 mb of ram, a 20gb ata66 hdd and 8mb agp matrox has more power then I'll ever need. As I'm not into "HEAVY GAMING", I can not afford to keep up with all the hardware changes.
bdj