Another important factor in the latest round of thin vs. thick (lots more storage and processing capability) clients is that the current generation of mobile devices offer light weight attractive packaging, fast access to content (no wait for boot and applicationchanges) and reasonable battery life (although this is an area of much needed development).
What I found interesting, however, is a statement that Steve made during his presentation where he claimed that the new VMware View 4.5 Offline mode can take a VM in offline mode and synchronize the changes back to the Master image, including application installs and registry changes.