Re-inventing the mainframe

I saw an article last night about HP's new pricing units based on something they call a "computon". It's a way to do pricing of hardware based on usage, allowing the user to utilize capacity as needed. It makes the high end systems more affordable, etc., etc..

While this is all well and good, it is yet another case of mainframe capabilities from years ago being re-invented. My goodness, we can charge by the hour for computer usage. Isn't this kind of thing that created the PC revolution? Didn't users want to pry the systems away from the acolytes of IBM and CDC and put the power on the desktop in the users hands in a form that was cheap and ubiquitous?

I guess we are doomed to recreate the mainframe again and again. What next OS virtualization, clustering, subscription software ... ?