Google pushing a Chrome OS makes me wonder if they have the right confluence of conditions to actually create a system based on the Intel CloneCloud concept, where a netbook OS relies on additional horsepower from a google backed grid cloud that allows expanding an OS beyond a single netbook to including the computing resources of a linked clone in the google cloud. Your personal desktop is semi-anchored between the netbook and a cloud clone instance, a sort of bridged hetereogenous cluster OS. This would also have an easy to exploit subscription service revenue stream, and a semi-controlled user data storage environment that Google can freely mine/index for patterns and metadata. Like Windows lock-in, you become so dependent on google services that the costs to migrate away to either another cloud platform or a standalone OS is excessive.

Taking a different tack, instead of basing a full desktop in the cloud and providing a VNC-like window portal to lesser devices such as smartphones, do the reverse, and have an adaptable smartphone OS architectures that can offload the system as a whole or in part to a nearby cloud computing hosting facility to perform battery intensive operations. This ranges from opportunistic full cloning of the local device to execute on a more powerful server, to using the cloud for always-on external storage and execution of stuff that is too much for a smartphone. Android is a nice bridge here since it's all java either local or remote, so you can abstract a lot of the cloning and adapting pain away.