India plans cheap laptop option - an outlook into the future of mobile computing

Some days ago, India announced that it is planning to produce a low cost laptop intended for use by school children and students (see article). Since the introduction of the One Laptop Per Child's XO machine and the Intel Classmate this is nothing really exciting; new about this pronounced laptop is its price: Originally, the XO was intended to cost $100 but the finished version ended up costing about $188 - the laptop from India is supposed to cost $10. This was later corrected as a typo and some reports talk about a potential misunderstanding as the $10 might not be the production costs, but the sales costs with the difference subsidized.

Whatever the case, the existing One Laptop per Child XO machine for $188 is currently developed towards a lower price and the now so successful Netbooks are already available from below $300. This clearly shows a trend towards ultra low cost laptops, so at one day in the future the $10 will probably be possible. This has at least two effects:

First, a lot more people will be able to afford a computer, get education in using it and will probably go online - all this making the world a better place from a certain perspective – and probably provide the “first world” with some completely new insights as long as the new internet users are capable of writing in English.

Second, in the developed countries, a laptop will become something non-significant like a pocket calculator – some decades ago, a pocket calculator was unthinkable and when the first came out it was a big fuss and only affordable for institutions or individuals who really needed it. Based on this, currently unimaginable ideas come to mind like the disposable laptop (it will certainly be fully bio degradable - at least I hope so ;-), a laptop as a gift from a company at a recruiting event, or whatever (this makes perfectly sense if you store stuff online and view the device as a terminal).

More serious thoughts are: will these still be any printed media as $10 is almost as cheap as an expensive magazine or a typical pocket book? If you take a look at the new Kindle 2, I cannot really imagine there is. If there is also a touch screen, one could even make annotations/ highlights which would it even possible to get rid of school books or course packages.
Maybe you guys have even more interesting idea/implications and make some comments.

In the context of this class, it is even more interesting to think about new possibilities of marketing: if the system knows what you are reading, what you have purchased, it may offer very precise recommendations for stuff that might interest the owner. So the "Amazon recommendations" would be everywhere.