Despite all the talk about Moore's law and all that, what this really means is that user-experience has gone all the way down to silicon. Raw performance just isn't important to most people these days. They want a small, light, just-works, good power consumption, doesn't have annoying hickups or laggyness experience.
Intel's trying to build the chips that can support this and not trying to enable regular consumers to fold proteins or factor primes.
Needs have plateau-d too. Remember when transcoding a CD in mp3 was an hour thing that may fail ? Most of the mainstream needs have been addressed in term of compute power. What's missing, as you said, is global "perf", low Wattage, smooth UI, simple and fast enough peripherals. We'd love easy printers but Intel is only Intel.
Heck, even my 6 year old spare desktop can transcode highdef video on the fly. That used to be the stuff of dreams.
I think the implications are clear, it's time for software developers to start thinking about performance if their work is slow, you can't just expect consumers to go out and throw more hardware at it.
Things are messy nowadays (web, native, crossplatform, gpgpu, opencl) and people can't apply their brain to performance as it was in the old days when there was simply no other choice.
I bet in a few years a lot of cruft will vanish. OpenGL removed a big part of it for clarity. The web and native will gather (see how dynamic languages are jit compiled, and take low level into account). Hopefully overall efficiency will improve, for builders and customers.
People's happiness have started to shift with size and battery. People are willing to even get something a bit slower now if it means half the size (new MacBook, MacBook Air and other small laptops based on Intel's Core M Broadwell).
Intel's trying to build the chips that can support this and not trying to enable regular consumers to fold proteins or factor primes.