In which Marco admits to stalking me:

[The entirely theoretical Apple tablet] can be the computer that we buy our parents or grandparents without worrying that we’re signing ourselves up for years of painful tech support calls as they “lose” documents by saving them in the wrong folder, think they can’t save any more files because the desktop is full of icons, delete their browsers’ icons and tell us the internet is gone, keep five different antivirus products half-installed, and fill their RAM with programs they never Quit because they just close every window instead and don’t notice the tiny “running” dot in the Dock or know what it indicates.

He’s right though. Somewhere between the real points Marco makes, along with Siracusa’s take, and what Gruber talks about lies the truth of the Tablet. But I think the biggest thing to come out of the whole tablet introduction will ultimately be the beginning of real convergence between the various compartments of the Apple product line. Right now, Apple has the iPhoneOS and MacOS; presumably, these are about to be joined by TabletOS (which is likely sort of an iPhoneOS+). All of these, of course ride atop some version of OS X. With the introduction of the Tablet, I suspect we’ll begin to see how they all fit together. My prediction extends Gruber’s gist: not only will iPhone apps work as widgets on the Tablet, they’ll work as widgets on MacOS (under its next revision). And not on the Dashboard (though Apple could presumably choose to put them in there too), but on the desktop.

Doing this allows for a whole new class of applications. You’d still have essentially single-purpose iPhone apps: do one small thing and do it very well. Add to that more powerful, tablet and desktop aimed apps: more pixels, more computing power. Bundling this together as a unitary application bundle allows you to implant an iPhone app inside the desktop version; thus you can offer multi-platform sync. Sure, I can’t actually edit X-app documents on the phone, but I can view them easily and do these other, more minor edits on them. Bento offers a paleo-version of this setup today; you can create databases and various data-structures on the phone or the desktop and they sync data and the underlying table designs back and forth…certain features, though, only work on the desktop version.
It makes much more sense going forward for Apple to abstract away the “I’m ready to sync” part of the current equation; you buy the app, it comes with an iPhone app, they are linked and automatically exchange info. Changes then sync next time you dock the phone or tablet or, presumably, automatically over the air if you so desire. All the fiddly bits with saving, file structure, and whatnot are totally abstracted away.  THIS is why the tablet will matter. THIS is “what it does” that compels people to buy one.

What this means for the broader Macintosh platform as this more abstracted take on the file system gradually metastasizes up the product chain is left as an exercise for the student.