I like this analogy... It's very true, and has a lot of local rendering which at the time of X terminals was a bit of a pipe dream. They could just locally render some things like fonts.
Sun also tried to get into this game early with the JavaStations. But they were ridiculously slow, so painful to use. In fact they kind of ruined Java for me. I was learning it at the time, and we got a JavaStation on loan from somewhere. Working on it just established this "Java = slow" feeling in my head and really put me off so much I went to do other things.
Of course this wasn't really deserved, and Java has gone on to become powerful (though I still consider its poor intra-version compatibility an issue). But I've never been able to quite shake that feeling.
