It’s starting to happen. $35 is about the price point where hard drive capacities go to die, so very low-end machines are starting to ship with the most basic of basic SSDs since it’s possible to get less than $35 worth of flash storage. Right now 128GB SSDs still usually sell for over $35 so we’re not seeing low-end systems ship with those yet, but we may very well start seeing that next year.

The two things I can think of that chew up terabytes of disk space are gaming and collecting videos, which is a vocal subset of the market, but, as you say, a subset of the market. Most other people can get by with a 256gb SSD rather easily and a 128gb SSD with a bit of effort (I can speak from experience on that), and I agree, once SSDs are standard boot drives, that will be a good thing. And using an SSD for booting and HDD for data is always an option, the same way we used optical discs when hard drives were small and expensive.

Most people don’t come anywhere near to filling up their hard disks. It doesn’t matter if you have 500gb or 256gb of storage if you’re only storing around 100gb on it. But every computer has to have a disk of some kind. Right now, a basic low end hard disk (say 500gb or 1tb) is, what, maybe half as expensive as a basic (128-256gb) SSD? If SSDs can lower their price per disk to the neighbourhood of hard disks, we might finally see SSDs becoming the standard boot drive in every computer. And that will be a very good thing.