[lifeeth_]

For a long time, I struggled with a similar view. The lines for this are blurring very fast though. Example - Amazon's kindle is more or less a single purpose system - but runs linux, lasts for days on battery, has good RAM and a relatively powerful processor.

[davidw]

One useful metric is how far something is along the "general purpose computer - appliance" continuum. Something can be quite powerful with lots of resources, and still function as an appliance that people do a relatively restricted set of things with.