Here's an interesting tidbit: I have noticed an even more pronounced trend toward centralized or virtual workstations lately. Both my wife and I can sit at home, as we are now, at the dining room table and work on our laptops (exciting life, I know!) but both of us are not actually working locally on these machines. We are both remoting into machines at our respective workplaces. Hers is a desktop machine physically located at her desk, while mine is a virtual workstation in my company's data center across the state. What's interesting is that we don't need anything special in terms of hardware to do this. It doesn't matter that my work laptop is a five year old boat anchor, or a netbook, or whatever. Anything with a working display, network, pointer and keyboard would do. It makes good sense from a cost and a security point of view to let the employee roam but keep more of the decent equipment, data and data processing inside the network.
Last week I was walking past someone at the office using an iPad to do just this, and I thought, "Ah ha!" I had thought of the iPad only for entertainment and light internet use, but it might just be a perfect light-duty RDP client too. Display, pointer, keyboard, wireless, browser and secure RDP - check. Not bad.