Yes, the author really figured out what the main issue is right there.
And BTW, there are lots of SSDs that aren't laptop-hard-drive size. The ones in the eeepc are just mini-PCI cards -- very small.
Somewhere Ray Kurzweil is getting very excited.
For one thing, CPUs don't have to do anything when power is not applied to them. Your disk has to keep all its data regardless of whether it has power or not.
Ignoring that, storage is something you need a lot more of than addition circuits or whatever; if you look at the diagrams of CPUs showing what transistors show what purposes, you'll see a lot of them are the cache. Because there is more need for storage than computation.
