While that indeed may be true, I saw a large number of tablets throughout the convention, seen both within the sessions and the keynotes
Those are wannabe hipsters. I bet they had a keyboard addon to the tablet, right? Well a proper laptop (whether PC or Mac) is WAY more productive than a tablet. I just facepalm when I see someone use tablet for productivity in order to try to look cool.
many people's perception of what's possible in real time has been completely changed
This is due to most people only knowing "console graphics" and that we're soon at the end of the line for this generation of consoles. As simple as that. Every time a console gamer friend sees how games look on my PC they're always impressed.
We won't be at the end of line in a long time. Why? Even the faster graphics cards won't run Battlefield 3 at full settings. There's just no way. Even an AMD 6950 barely keeps proper framerates (40+) during the most intensive graphics of BC2. Ray-tracing gets more complex the further away the ray has to travel. Ray-tracing in large open sandbox games is a lot more for the GPU to do VS one in a small enclosed room.
To all this you can add larger resolutions (1080p is quite lame if you think about it really) and then 3D. Sure a lot of people who haven't had 3D gaming will say it's gimmicky but it's actually fun to turn on once in a while. 3D in gaming is true 3D.
Kal-El outperforms the Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 processor
No, no and no! How can you continue to spread this nonsense?! I'm an AMD person and I will defend Intel here, that's how wrong this is. You're supposed to be know your things and not spread lies! It's your job as a news poster on one of the larger Tech sites. Nvidia did the lame trick to give Kal-El an optimized version of Coremark for the benchmark whereas the T7200 didn't get it!
A few Google searches can get you a long way. Here I did some homework for you about Kal-El vs Intel T7200:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Nvidia-s-Kal-El-Quad-Core-ARM-Chip-Is-Actually-Slower-Than-Intel-s-Core-2-Duo-T7200-185406.shtml