What happens when computing processing and storage become fully virtual?

Lately, the IT world has been humming with a variety of acronyms and buzzwords as usual. We hear about SOA and ITIL as well as "virtualization." Here virtualization generally refers to the ability to separate the computational capabilities associated with a business process from specific servers or other hardware. In effect, grid computing in which any terminal on a given grid can access the functions available. Google has stepped into this space with their own advances in grid computation / "cloud computing". They may be selling or giving away capacity equivalent to supercomputing to the average consumer soon (Now avilable to businesses through services like 3Tera's. Amazon has been providing network storage to enable this sort of independence. Calculation and storage are the key components of fundamental virtualization. At a higher level, there are issues with taking a specific application, such as Microsoft Word, and allowing an individual to login to that application from any terminal and get their work as last saved without having to re-open the file, etc. This sort of issue is solved by products such as VMWare's or Citrix's. Enabling this revolution is a variety of core software and hardware advances that the public has largely ignored as they happened silently in the background. Up to now, system software, for example, has been very CPU specific. Recent versions of Intel chips have added support for VT-x and VT-i capabilities. Now for the fun part. Sun developed a new file system technology called ZFS. It creates fundamental grid storage and self-healing capabilities to the average person. And now, in addition to Solaris, ZFS is built into the Mac OSX. More later...