To be fair, I don't think the integrated device model is worse than the beige box model per se. Tablets and smartphones afford us completely new ways to interact with computers (and each other). Recent ones, such as the Nexus 7, are reasonably priced to boot. There are some perhaps unavoidable consequences of replacing whole devices rather than individual components (environmental, to say the least), but in the abstract I think it's hard to say whether one model is necessarily worse than the other.