If Gates is right, how much longer for keyboards & mice?

It wasn't exactly `Minority Report' but Bill Gates's technology demonstration at the company's CEO Summit earlier today may be remembered years from now as a harbinger of the end for the keyboard and mouse era. Not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But soon enough.
As Gates demoed a 4-foot-by-6-foot prototype called TouchWall, there was little resemblance to Tom Cruise's futuristic data juggling in that 2002 sci-fi performance as he moved 3-D screens around with simple hand gestures. Making what is likely his last appearance as master of ceremonies at this annual conclave of corporate heavy hitters, Gates used the show-and-tell session to offer a prediction.

in the future, he said, all surfaces will feature "an inexpensive screen display capability and software that sees what you're doing there so that it's completely interactive."

I've been watching Gates give performances like these since 1985 and it's wise to treat his predictions with the appropriate grain of salt. When it comes to Microsoft, the concept of vaporware is not entirely foreign. Still, I found the demo interesting when you consider the topic against the backdrop of what Microsoft is developing in Windows 7. In fact, a couple of months ago, Gates hinted at future support for touch-based gestures and speech recognition in a the post-Vista OS.