I'm entirely convinced that Shuttleworth's vision of convergence will happen. It looks like an inevitability, as mobile computing power continues to grow faster than typical consumer workloads (the same forces already made it possible for $400 laptops to be good enough for most mainstream users).
Canonical just didn't have the resources to push a 3rd mobile platform. Hell, even Microsoft gave up (who did have the resources, and IMO made a mistake in giving up).
Just my opinion: It will be Chromebook+Android or more the mixture of both. Google is playing well by saying: "The time and technology is not yet ready for this to happen." But I'm also convinced it will happen sooner or later. And I'm sure Apple has some experiments in this direction... iOS and macOS are technically more the same than Android vs. ChromeOS.
I just hope I get a good usable *nix terminal with the laptop mode ;)
Yep , I thing OS will all go the convergation way. The main problem is that they couldn't gain more apps to that vision. Classic chiken and egg problem.
And to be more ironic ,a few weeks ago, I was under the impression that Ubuntu Phone and SailfishOS have stated to getting traction.
Sometimes the market and/or the user base is not ready for a new piece of tech. I agree with you about the inevitability of convergence but perhaps it wasn't supposed to happen just now.
Canonical just didn't have the resources to push a 3rd mobile platform. Hell, even Microsoft gave up (who did have the resources, and IMO made a mistake in giving up).