Ray Ozzie's 'dawn of a new day' post, on leaving Microsoft, is worth reading if you haven't already seen it.
It's a good snapshot of a broad set of things going on in the computing and networking space. There's a useful model for understanding how many of the important components being built will fit together :

" a world of

1.  cloud-based continuous services that connect us all and do our bidding, and 
2.  appliance-like connected devices enabling us to interact with those cloud-based services." 

He predicts that this is the correct model for the next 5 years: particularly, that apps and browsers will enable simplicity for the end user, so that they really don't have to understand how the car works in order to drive it.

Most of what he's saying could be regarded as obvious, though it is worth noticing that he thought to say what he has to the executive staff at Microsoft ...

He explicitly calls out embedded devices as a subset of connected devices.

My thought is that there is an opportunity here, to create " appliance-like, easily configured, interchangeable and replaceable without loss" devices. The design and software requirements for such things, though more relaxed than they were in the first era of microprocessor process control, require a more precise discipline than is necessary for application software to be directly used by humans. There will be constraints on available power, space, operating temperature, network bandwidth, and connection capability. Toolsets to support development of this kind are still expensive and complex compared to normal software development environments.
Hardware platforms exist, and prices are dropping rapidly, driven by the huge volume requirements of the low end of the mobile phone platforms.

For an example confirming the other part of the model, look at the growth of Google's traffic as seen from the public Internet - the majority of this is video, with Youtube as the service. Craig Labovitz (Arbor Networks) estimates Google's traffic volume as being between 6% and 12% of all the Internet traffic in the world, and it's still growing.

References

Ray Ozzie's letter, on leaving Microsoft, 28 October 2010
Google's traffic as a percentage of all Internet traffic

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