I've said before and I'll hold pretty tough to it... The SP3 "upgrade" is in many ways very similar to what occurred for Apple when they introduced the first "Retina" display in the iPads. Although this increase in screen resolution had real and tangible benefits to many, it WAS a trade-off in terms of performance for what the processing power at the time could provide. Thus, the 4th Gen of the iPad became the "true" successor to the iPad 2. I feel that the SP3 is very similar to this situation. While many of the changes can be considered improvements to a great many, the fact is that they came at a cost... namely performance and thermal design (don't know if those can be divorced anyway). Like the iPad 3rd generation, this in no way makes the SP3 some sort of poor design or bad machine, but it most certainly does lead one to believe that the "ideal" device is still down the road. The SP3 in my mind is a leading machine... ahead of the curve and trying to stretch other PC makers to come up with new, better, and more inspiring designs. Therefore, it might always be a little too soon or a little too ahead of things, but that's fine to me. I don't use the SP2 anymore even though I still have it sitting here in the house, but that's only because I don't game on this device and my workload does not require some inordinate amount of processing or GPU prowess. If I need to use virtualization, then I'll do it remotely on hardware that was designed for it. If I need to game, then I'll do it on a system that was designed to do so. I feel the SP3 is a general computing device and I use it as such.
Will Braswell bring the SP4 or whatever it will be when it arrives to some sort of happy place involving thermal efficiency and power? I don't know, but it certainly can't hurt. I get how many are thinking that it won't be a huge upgrade... but if the reality is that it is the thermal load on the system holding the SP3 back today and Braswell brings about more thermal efficiency, then isn't it logical to believe that while the chip itself might not offer significant upgrades in terms of raw processing power that it might be able to more closely achieve the maximum amount of that performance where today that is not possible due to constrained thermal loads?
I love the SP3 and I'm not getting rid of mine, but I am certainly excited about what the future holds for the device as advances are made in efficiencies and mobile GPU power.