The Home Entertainment Centre That's Small Enough to Hold?

I was talking with a friend the other day about how technology compresses everything, and we were discussing how the laptop/pc can almost replace an entire home entertainment centre.

I knew that a pc could play and burn dvds, cds etc, but didn't know that it could also be used to play radio and tv stations. Basically it can do everything that a home entertainment centre does but in a much smaller package. All you mite want to add is some speakers and a larger screen or projector.

This is kind of funny, because I always thought that the whole idea of the home entertainment centre was to make everything bigger, louder and basically reproduce the feeling of a movie theatre at home. The large screen, the surround sound etc, all function to recreate the feeling of being in the movies. Far from being compressed, the home entertainment centre is usually displayed within a large wall unit or cabinet, with a stack of technology like the dvd player, vcr (although now a little uncool), the stereo and so on. Then there is the huge screen, and the surrround sound wired around the living room. With technology like the pc compressing all this down into one tiny, portable package, is there a possibility that the era of the huge home entertainment system may come to an end??