Just an anectote about app/game streaming: I've recently played Orcs Must Die 2 on OnLive, a game-streaming service, and was very much surprised by the responsiveness! I think that probably a lot of apps/games will work just fine.
Yeah I think this type of stuff will depend a lot on buffering/rendering technology. You can imagine that it would be a terrible experience if it literally sent your keypress to the server, registered it in a game & then sent back the screens display pixels.
But I imagine (as with online gaming systems) that the experience is much more like... server loads the necessary rendering resources into the devices RAM/storage and then gameplay occurs the same as if files were loaded from a CD/other media.
I'm sure you could learn more by digging deeper but I imagine it is something more along those lines -- advanced API for a rendering engine.
> You can imagine that it would be a terrible experience if it literally sent your keypress to the server, registered it in a game & then sent back the screens display pixels.
I doubt this is the case because in order to play a game on any platform you'd first have to account for the different architecture. Furthermore, one of the core reasons this tech was even created was so that people with low power hardware could play the latest and greatest. There's no way a tablet is rendering game instructions to begin with, let alone virtualized instructions.
The truth is I/O is much slower then networking. Many LCD displays do image processing which results in it being several frames behind the one the GPU is currently pushing out. So between your desktop and your monitor could be 70ms of latency. On top of that there's the delay in input devices.
If streamers could maintain 30ms of network latency then it's just a minor difference from the system baseline.
If the streamers are smart they could colocate with the game servers. Then that 30ms of network latency is there regardless, home system or streaming system. It effectively adds no lag for streaming.
