If you think of transcoding video as video chat and photoshopping as automatic photo color correction and indexing when you import your photos, just about everybody does it.
I am very happy with my Atom-based netbook, but, you know, there is no such thing as a computer that's too fast.
transcoding video as video chat and photoshopping as automatic photo color correction
The former can be done more efficiently in dedicated hardware, which is also bound to be cheap. I suspect that this could apply to the latter as well. Just take the most common operations, such as the ones supported by iPhoto on OS X and support those in hardware.
There may be no such thing as a computer that's too fast, but there's also computers which are too hot, too heavy, too bulky, or useless because they no longer have power.
I'd like a cheap thing with the form factor of the MacBook Air, which can also act as a virtual terminal to my Smart Phone. The amount of computing power on a current smart phone is way more than enough for a majority of work-related computing. Add in sync backup of the smart phone to the cloud, and I think that would be ideal. You'd have none of the disadvantage of cloud computing, plus all of the advantages. You'd also have all of the advantages of the phone/pocket computer form factor, but none of the disadvantages when you need a better input device.
>> "there is no such thing as a computer that's too fast."
Right, but my point was that these days it's more likely to be the HDD, or network that's the bottleneck most of the time.
My Macbook pro is absolutely never CPU bound. It could have half the CPU power and I wouldn't really particularly care. Half the CPU power but SSD would be a massive performance gain.
I am very happy with my Atom-based netbook, but, you know, there is no such thing as a computer that's too fast.