time will tell I guess, but I cannot see it changing too much. no one mass jumped to netbooks because they were smaller and more portable. its a fad, that will be short lived in my opinion. people will have them, like they have smart phones now. but can anyone on here say they have sold their laptop and/or desktop because the smartphone has replaced it?
There wasn't a massive jump to netbooks because they were rubbish. Barely able to run windows (without anything intensive), poor screen resolution and poor battery life. They also crashed when the tablets came out as they were more suited to the tasks people were using netbooks for yet they were lighter, faster (for the tasks they wanted) and had a significantly better battery life.
Basically netbooks were for people who couldn't afford the £1000+ it cost to get a decent ultraportable. The release of low end iPads and Android tablets in the £200-400 range meant there was no need for them any more.
You'll also see in the near future that the ultraportable we know now (the ultrabooks (inc. the MB Air)) will change massively. They already are... The ultrabooks will start converting into slates with detachable keyboards for when they are not needed, still running x86 processors.
In a couple of years we will have a full compliment of netbook eating cheap Arm Tablets (Android, iOS, Win RT) and ultrabook eating x86 convertibles/tablets running Windows 8.
They won't destroy the markets they replace entirely, there will always be netbooks a conventional ultrabooks around but the market will shift towards the tablet forms. Much like we have seen over the last few years, first with the shift with consumers (and business) from desktops to laptops (see the high street electronics stores) and then from laptops to Tablets as they have got cheaper and cheaper. Many people will have both/all three, many people will just have a tablet for playing games and browsing the net, especially when Windows 8 and the other OSs really show what cloud computing can do (why use the same machine when you can get all the data on any machine you use?)
I fully expect in the next 5-10 years the next big jump to be from high powered devices to thin "terminals" with just a screen, battery and cloud connection. All the work done by central computers (be that be a personal home server in your house or one run by Microsoft or your company). You already have many companies that have all your work and account details on a central server so you can sign in and carry on from any computer in your office and you have many companies moving to thin clients where all the work is done on the central server. The biggest issue we have with this as a mainstream portable product is the bandwidth it needs. That will be overcome in a few years time and the idea of just having a sheet you can unfold/unroll to the size you want will really come into it's own. Imagine a 4" screen you use as your phone that you can unfold to an 8" screen a couple of mm thick and use to watch that film? That's where it's going.
and as most tablets will take an SD card without anything sticking out from the device, it would be the preferred method of storage. I don't know about where you live, but in cornwall we don't have hotspots everywhere, so skydrive is useless without a wifi connection is it not? so if I wanted to do work on the go, I would need some form of storage.