If you are doing more demanding tasks, you probably already have a more powerful workstation and don't fit into the "average" group.
For power users and in a production environment the powerful workstation will still have a place for some time.
Increasingly powerful workstations to act as servers will allow the much more computationally intensive comparisons of megabase-sized genomes.
Apple's Mac Pro desktop is a powerful workstation designed for high-end graphics designers and small business owners.
Three more, at speeds of 600, 667 and 700 MHz, are to be used in powerful workstations and servers that consumers rarely see.
I've seen powerful workstations that take forever to boot, and primitive home computer that boot nearly instantly.
In the past, symbolic calculations were done on supercomputers and the most powerful and expensive scientific workstations.
I'd hate to be in the position of needing a powerful workstation and professional software, with Apple pretty firmly going off in the other direction.
Statistical analysis techniques in taxonomy demand the use of powerful workstations, as would chemotaxonomic methods.
Infini-D was part of a larger trend in bringing 3D technologies once only available in powerful workstations to a wider personal computer audience.