I honestly don't know what you mean by saying mobile phones are abysmal at multitasking (multi threading? Multiple processes? Drawing Multiple UIs?). Mine doesn't seem to have a problem with multi threading or multiple processes and the only reason I don't use it more is because the UI is horrible and I can't replace it.
Also if your source files are long enough to slow your editor down you should probably start factoring stuff out (long files are hard to read), but I've never heard of or seen that actually happening IRL.
You're probably being downvoted because you're nitpicking language and missing the entire point of what the parent comment is saying, which is that there are more types of compute-intense workloads than raw "number crunching" and these workloads cannot or should not be offloaded to the cloud.
@swiley so all YOU do is 1) something on your phone, 2) compile something to send to 3) a cloud super computer...
And you completely ignore all the other reasons for power given: Photoshop, Video Editing, Gaming (not Farmville), CAD, etc... all using various shades of gray between "Internet browsing" and "Super Computer Number Crunching"
That willful? ignorance is why you are getting downvoted into oblivion.
The only things you can think of related to software development are compiling small applications and opening single text files in editors? What about an IDE that does partial compilation/indexing every time you change a line? What about searching through large codebases? Etc.
