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Thin clients as model for simplifying user experience and security

In both conversations and in print, I can see that significant thought is being put into how to secure the typical user computing environment (from normal office workers to home computers). A recent

report from AOL and the National Cyber Security Alliance shows exactly how unsecure most home pc’s are: 80% of their participants had malware on their pcs.

Peter Coffee from eWeek offers a different perspective that looks at increasing automation and lack of choice (think Windows autoupdates) will alienate users and cause them to disable these critical utilities. His editorial piece addresss this perplexing issue, one that I am tracking as being a weakness of the installed-base desktop model. If systems, users, and enterprises move a rich client, server based, distributed model - there is essentially one installation to maintain. Things are patched once centrally, with each user’s system adjusting to the updates at their next login.
The logic of this progression is clear, as is the underlying math - we have ever bigger applications that require ever bigger patches. Security has finally become a concern for most users, so there is more traffic created by both the patches and the exploits. These patches are so enormous that they are unmanageable for dial up users, and onerous even for those on high speed connections.
Since we’re working off a 20-year old base for many core applications, rewrites from the ground up seem far less possible than a shift to a hosted model.
In the burgeoning software as a service model, perhaps one of the key benefits will be a shift in the mental state of users - they shift from expecting full control of their computer, to being tolerant of a web-based experience that someone else controls. ?