There was a time when many people looked forward to a faster CPU, because it meant you could open Word documents more quickly.
That time is long gone. As a developer, laptops have been fast enough for my purposes since around 2000.
Coding Horror, 2010:
CPUs? All stupid fast at any price, with more cores
and gigahertz than you'll ever need unless you're one
of those freaks who does nothing but raytracing and
video transcoding all day long.
Excluding servers and scientific computing, the only groups I know of that still want more power are hardcore gamers and video editors. Even for these, the bottleneck is frequently somewhere else than the CPU.
I think my mother and sisters represent mainstream computing better than I do: The check mail, watch YouTube videos and look at pictures of the family. There's nothing there that requires more computing power than what tablets have today.
The Google Nexus 7 is $200. It has enough computing power for what most of my family uses computers for. It still has other limitations that may make it unsuitable as a wholesale PC replacement - say ports for plugging in a large monitor, options for printing, drivers for various USB devices - but those limitations do not primarily call for a faster CPU.
If you disagree, I'd be curious to know where you see a mass market for significantly more CPU power than what we expect from the natural evolution of ARM.
Show me one table at $200 that does everything a grandma would want.
> The main issue is that the vast majority simply don't need all that much computing power
That's just wild speculation that needs a reference, especially since the history of PC proves otherwise.