I am sure the same thing was thought about never getting to a point where every person would have a tiny computer in their pocket that was orders of magnitudes faster than the multi-million dollar computers that took up whole rooms and were only owned by the largest companies.

You mean a tiny computer in your pocket that you can mostly just consume content with and chat with others. Sure there are some neat, useful apps out there, but you can't really learn how technology works on a tablet or phone unless you're allowed to build that specific kind of app. You don't even have a filesystem. 10 year old me in today's world would have not been able to break my phone like I did my old DOS / Win95 PC and actually learn something. Shit I used to spend hours just browsing the filesystem, and the install media to see what I could find and learn and use. That's how I found the Weezer music video, and the pinball game on the Win95 I still CD. There is no equivalent to this with phones.