It's hard to say, and I think it will be a very long and difficult process. Computers still behave in a way that is very foreign to someone who has not used a computer. Computers are still extremely stupid. Over the course of the entire lifetime of computers, people have tried to make software that is more and more intelligent, and anticipates your needs more. I honestly don't know whether they truly do good job of catering to laymen or not, but to me they seem to fall flat on their face. User interface design and artificial intelligence seem to be the big two. These are what are being alluded to more and more in current software (well, *better* UI's, that is). One amazing example was the article about the newest longhorn alpha release. When something crashes, it asks you to debug. Instead of having buttons with verbs on them, they have OK and cancel. When I see this dialog, I have to read the whole thing just to know what's going on. Information overload (to a layman). The buttons should say "Debug" and "Don't debug", or something similar. This is an ancient, well known piece of a good UI, and the brand spankingest OS falls on it's face. Personally I just say fvck it. I have plenty of time to learn, so I don't waste my time with software that treats me like an idiot. I am in full control of my computer and it works how I want, but that's a totally different situation from, say, my grandparents, who are learning the intricacies of aol buddy lists and are still pretty confused about it.
As far as games go, I think graphics will always be an important thing. Even when they are able to totally mimic reality, they will simply make games have graphics that are beyond reality. Take the matrix, or many other films for example. Stories and gameplay are always important too, as well as good AI for single player, and immersive multiplayer modes. One thing that is somewhat worrying is MMORPGs, the depth of their gameplay can cause people to play for tens upon tens of hours to become just an "ok" player, and hundreds of hours to be powerful. The games are goal oriented, with the goal being ridiculously hard to reach, but little tiny goals that you can complete quickly along the way that keep things fun. The social aspect and gee-whizness of a real world, with people, houses, shops, forests, etc, outside of our normal world, is very fascinating, and that's what humans love, gee-whizness. One amusing example I can remember reading was from the book "In the Beginning Was the Command Line" by Neil Stephenson: a man was at disneyworld, on the set of a mock-up of a wild west town. Everything was fake, obviously. The man was videotaping it, and while doing so, watching everything through the lcd on his camera. So you have a guy watching through a screen, a video of a mock-up wild west scene, he's sort of two or three steps out of reality. I know that didn't sound all that great the way I remembered and typed it, but it was much better in the book.
Another example is games. People love to ooh-ahh at scenes of beautifully rendered forests and villages in games, when they could just go to a forest in real life. I dunno, it's all confusing
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