I found this interesting as it is Shuttleworth like 3-4 months ago talking to his programmer troops as they swung into finishing this Nexus 7 Tablet thing that they just now completed. He is doing other new stuff with servers, with clouds, with Hewlet Packard and lo and behold Microsoft wants to be Ubuntu "data transfer compatible" all of a sudden.
HP has never been an enemy of open source. Google IS open source. So for Microsoft to be even talking about data transfer compatibility is a big step forward for Microsoft as in the past it was MS's way or u go away ....
Google and Ubuntu are rapidly changing a lot of folks precepts of what it takes to "be a computer". As the man says in the video, this past years cell phones have enough grunt to be a Linux PC. The Tegra 3 in the Nexus 7 has plenty of power and memory to run PC level Linux.
What I am expecting based on his words and overall approach to the phone/tablet thing is that someone is going to lay out a docking station that hits the phone (or Nexus 7 tablet) correctly on its input side, both for data transfer port and power port. The docking station will have built in USB 3 or USB 2 jacks for standard things like keyboards, monitors, mice, USB hard drives, etc.
Once Ubuntu has raped scraped and loaded on the device, you can treat the back side of your loading dock like the back of your current PC and jack up whatever you want.
When you unplug the phone/tablet from the dock, it acts like a Ubuntu phone or tablet.
When you dock it, you see a Ubuntu PC on your big screen monitor.
So, you buy one phone or one tablet. You buy one mating docking station. You are done until the phone busts or becomes obsolete.
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In one fell swoop, no more Microsoft and no more Intel. =======================
Now, Shuttleworth isn't an American and quite frankly this effort is really based out of Europe, Indonesia, India, Africa and the Russian states. Most of his programmers are French, English, Swedish, etc.
He isn't really concerned about Microsoft's and Intel's bottom line. Google, Dell, HP and Lenovo he cares about as they are existing partners elsewhere in the world.
Ubuntu is popular preloaded on laptops being sold in India, China, Indonesia and Africa. Many cities and banks and such use his software system-wide from the server down to the laptop as it is reliable and quite secure. (the man invented Veritas to make his first fortune after all).
So, if you see Shuttleworth as someone quite bright that is rolling things over a bit because he thinks they will work better that way, you got him pegged pretty well.
He's sorta Googlish, huh?