Over the past few years, technology pundits have been decrying desktop PCs as dead or dying. It’s certainly true that due to the recent bad economy, along with greatly reduced laptop prices, desktop PC sales have dramatically dwindled. As a result the writing is on the wall for the desktop PC that it will soon be nothing more than a fading memory.

This ideology is complete and utter nonsense, and the tech pundits should be ashamed of themselves for being proponents of it.

In many aspects of business, and even consumer usage, the desktop is unnecessary. You don’t need a desktop for email, documents, spreadsheets. Programmers usually don’t need a desktop for their work. Most mundane tasks can be handled with a laptop, a netbook, and even a smartphone in some cases.

But let’s face it — laptops just aren’t as powerful as equivalent desktops. Hard drives are slower. CPUs run hotter, so they can’t run as fast without burning up. Graphics chipsets aren’t as beefy. And internal expansion and upgrade of components is not an option.

Laptops are static systems. You can add some RAM, you can put in a bigger hard drive. But you can’t upgrade the CPU or graphics. You usually can’t put in more than one hard drive. You can’t replace the screen with a bigger one, although you can plug in an excternal one. Portable computers’ main advantage is that they are portable.

The average business worker doesn’t need a desktop. They can perform all of their daily tasks on a laptop. They can plug in a keyboard, mouse and monitor and have a desktop-like environment at their desk, and unplug the laptop when they need to be mobile.

With the exceptions noted above, the business community could dump the desktop and save a ton of money on electricity — the laptop draws much less power than a desktop system. They take up less space, they generate less heat, and they’re easy to repair or replace when needed.

Now consider a graphics design shop. They need high-end desktop systems, either Windows or Mac, driving high end design programs. A typical graphics designer or computer artist needs a lot of RAM, a powerful CPU and a high-end graphics card, possibly even a RAID array for storage to provide improved hard drive speed. And quite often they will need to upgrade these components.

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Google’s VP of online sales and operations has made the bold statement that in three years time desktop computers will be irrelevant.

Speaking at UCD in Dublin yesterday, Google Chief John Herlihy said that smartphones enhance Google’s mission to make information universal, adding that in Japan, more research is being done on cell phones than on PCs. Herlihy predicted that soon smartphones will be the center of it all.

“Mobile makes the world’s information universally accessible,” he said. “Because there’s more information and because it will be hard to sift through it all, that’s why search will become more and more important. This will create new opportunities for new entrepreneurs to create new business models – ubiquity first, revenue later.”

Herlihy’s statements have caused quite a stir in the tech world. There are those who wholeheartedly agree but Silicon Republic, who first reported the story, says that audience members were baffled. Indeed it’s hard to imagine office cubicles without desktops and even harder to imagine laptops meeting the needs of hardcore PC gamers.

But, whether you agree with his sentiments or not, it is clear the direction Google is taking as a company. Silicon Republic reports that, not too long ago, CEO Eric Schmidt told an audience at the Mobile World Congress that the company was working on products from a ‘mobile first’ prospective.

“Every recent product announcement we have made – and of course we have a desktop version – is being made from the point of view of it being used on a high-performance mobile phone on all the browsers that are available,” SR cites Schmidt as saying. “Now the programmers want to work on those apps for mobile that you can’t get on a desktop – applications that are personal and location-aware.”

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