on the consumer side? I agree with you. But the server side, when you are paying for power (and can consolidate a bunch of servers into one) the compute power available per watt makes a staggering difference. Yes, I can run my business off 100 servers from 5 years ago... or 25 modern servers, where the modern servers take about as much power one for one, as the 5 year old servers.

Considering that power/cooling/etc in a datacenter often goes for north of $250 per Kw per month, you can bet that we watch performance/watt very closely.