Interesting read. Doesn't this all sort of go back and forth historically? I'm no 'puter genius like some of you, but isn't this just another shift toward a thin client model? Which has happened before right? Maybe not.
Anyway, my personal theory is that Jobs knows he does not have long to live (although I hope that's not the case). Accordingly, he is attempting to accelerate Apple's dominance in all areas mobile and, well, cool. I think he introduced the iPad a bit early as part of this. Jobs seems like he's working on a tight deadline, and I don't think it's being driven by cloud computing.