While the arrangement has the advantage of allowing the use of essentially the same computer as a mobile device or on the desktop, there are still some issues that would need to be addressed in software.

For example, it would be less than ideal to treat a hard disk in the docking station simply as an external drive. Desktop drives are generally available in larger sizes than those designed for notebook use, and they are cheaper per gigabyte. This makes them ideal for storing large collections of digital media - something that has been central to Apple's strategy for years.

So you'd want to store your hundreds of gigabytes of music, movies and photos in the docking station. But what do you do on the road? We'd expect to see a future version of iTunes with the ability to treat the notebook as if it was an AppleTV or iPod, semi-automatically maintaining a subset of the library on the notebook's internal drive. You'd also want a mechanism for merging any new material into the library on the docking station. It's not hard to envisage a similar mechanism for iPhoto - it could either be an iPod shuffle like arrangement where a random subset is loaded, or the contents of specific albums might be transferred.

One curious point is that the application specifically covers the use of n removable (but otherwise iMac-style) stand so the docking station could be mounted directly to a vertical surface. That's not especially useful for desktop usage, and most wall-mount situations (retail, galleries, etc) don't call for docking stations. 

This could just be an ambit claim, but what sort of screen is increasingly being wall mounted in homes? Yep, flat-panel TVs. Although Apple's list of docking station peripherals doesn't include a TV turner, that does sound like an attractive option.

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