The price bump for full desktop Mathematica is much smaller, of course. $400 flute (for example), and then go for the $10,000+ flute if there is sufficient interest. It's just like a student learning a musical instrument. Let a K-12 student try the free or low cost cloud version to see if there is any interest, but then get a proper version. It seems to me that all the cloud initiatives are really just gateway drugs to get users to purchase Mathematica on their desktops. It's nice to be able to do this occasionally, but I can't think of any realistic case where I would want to do more than I can get Wolfram|Alpha to do where I would not have my laptop with me. It is not at all like trying to run a Mathematica notebook in the cloud from a Web browser.
In this case, of course, the cloud computing is really just a (rented) computer peripheral. The extra costs for doing the computations in the cloud would have to be competitive.
For exmple,is it cheaper to pay to have someone else 3D-print an object rather than buying a 3-D printer? I can (or will be able to soon be able to) buy a Thunderbolt cage for putting any GPU card I wish into, for roughly $1000-1500 USD. It's like any other add-on device or peripheral. There has been talk about offering this as a service at some of the WTCs I have attended, but there has been nothing official. The computations would have to be sufficiently complex and time-consuming that the communication latency would be acceptable. The only case where I can see cloud computing as an advantage is in cases where you can make use of a kernel in the cloud that has access to the proper GPU and enough cores to make the computation significantly faster than on the desktop. Using Mathematica (purchase the license rather than SaaS) is, as far as I can tell, less expensive in the long run as well. Any graphics rendering, let alone Dynamic content, using the cloud severely compromises performance.
I agree that the best user experience comes from using Mathematica on the desktop.
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