This is already happening in the corporate sector. Up until a few years ago, our clients would ship us laptops that were ties to their security systems and authorized to VPN into their networks. Today, every single one of them have us doing our work through VDIs (cloud based virtual desktops).
We considered cloud based VDIs for about an afternoon and immediately realized that a half dozen mini-PCs running VMWare, each capable of running 6-10 VMs would more than cover our needs, and all for less than $5,000.