[anttiok]

I think we're in rough agreement.

"The author's" assumption is that getting rid of unnecessary moving parts is an improvement. Having many slightly different copies of the same functionality in the stack is not redundancy, it's just silly -- "all problems with operating systems can be solved by removing layers of indirection"

I'm not too worried about companies selling tools instead of computers, just like I'm not upset upset that I didn't get a metallurgy plant when I bought a hammer. Yes, the philosophy of computation is a different thing (as Dr. Kay often points out), but sometimes you just need a tool instead of poetry. (nb. I'm not making a statement about whether or not everyone should understand computers)

Maybe if you think about a driver as a unit which performs a computation, the article will make more sense. I like to call drivers "protocol translators", but translating a protocol from one representation to another is really just a computation. The idea is to slowly liberate those units of computation from the clutches of the "centers", and then improve them, while still keeping the world functioning.