> For me, one of the points that this article seems to imply is that modern hardware can be extremely fast, but in our efforts to save "programmer time", we've sacrificed an order of magnitude or more of that.
To who and in what situations? To businesses(hardware and software) sure, they get products out faster and are motivated to push new stuff out. To end users, not so much, because they wait more and their batteries drain faster. They also pay more for hardware to have a "good experience".
They also have an order of magnitude more software to choose from, which tends to drive cost of software down through competition (though I'll grant it that most free models we're stuck with today suck, and I wish paying at least $10 for good software was still a common thing.) More importantly, a lower barrier of entry to developing allows a much longer tail of niche applications to be produced, and perhaps even more important, experts and hobbyists from other domains can go and create software using all the knowledge from their "main" field.
Sounds like a good deal!