^^^^^^^^^^Eventually, everyone will figure out, the network really is the computer.^^^^^^^^^^^
That's largely accurate.
Where I work is a great example of just the opposite. We have excellent bandwidth, a huge internet pipe; I've seen our networking back end. It rocks.
Our workstations stink to high hell. They all need ram upgrades, they all have horribly slow hard drives in them, and some brainiac IT person thinks it's cool to use the cheapest power supplies known to man. They're hotter than a stove and break often.
I submit to you that having the greatest network on earth doesn't mean a hill of beans if you can't even access it, or if your portal to the network, your workstation, is so god-awfully slow that the *network* is waiting for you to catch up.
It's all a balance.
For the average consumer sitting at the end of a cable connection, somewhat the best available ... mine is 8 MBit down, 512 KBit up, it doesn't matter one wit. Just throw up a monitoring program and watch. Business use, yeah it could make a difference, especially what I do, software development, where compile time is an issue. I just offload it to a local server -- A 4 GByte AMD x2 5000.
I wish my network was so capable and had so much bandwidth it has to wait for me ...