Many modern phones have enough processing power to perform most of the tasks that average notebook user does.
But the ecosystem is not there yet. The "desktop mode" interfaces are very basic, there are not many applications that can also take advantage of bigger screen, and docks / lapdocks are not widely used yet.

But, is it safe to assume that this will change over time?
The "smartphone" has already eaten up so many other peripherals. Music players, cameras, etc.
I think that it would make sense to expect that laptop will be one of them in the next decade or so.

And as Android is the most widely used mobile OS, and also allows for most experimentation, it will probably be in the front of this revolution.

Which brings me to my question: What can we do to help with this? Which parts of this using-your-phone-as-a-PC ecosystem should be developed / improved first in order to get this ball rolling faster?

But the downside here is that current phones are way more locked down than current PCs. Getting root access or even installing operating systems requires some serious technical skill or is even practically impossible on some models.
So when the phones take role of the laptops, we will have even less technological freedom than we have now.
So question here is, what can be done in order to mitigate this? Develop open source versions of currently proprietary software that makes desktop modes work?

I know that it is still relatively early, but I hope that this gets revisited often in the future, and that it gets more developers and other people thinking about this.