If everyone would just publish their papers on their web sites, as most computer scientists do (e.g., using bibbase.org), then this wouldn't be necessary. Of course, journals need to secure their funding, but I believe that with the web and the new open (peer) reviewing approaches, we don't really need journals all that badly anymore. Also, in computer science, e.g., it seems that there are now conferences that have higher standards of acceptance than the top journals in the respective fields. That is not to suggest to remove the concept of longer, more thoroughly reviewed articles though. They are important too, but could be reviewed and published in different ways (web). Print is so 19th century :-)

.. or are they just going to forget about the laser in the future and just use the accelerometer for that purpose? Sorry, but to me that doesn't seem quite patent worthy "a device with a motion sensor and a touch screen"? come on! I believe there are even already apps for that (using your touch-screen phone as a mouse).

You may want to consider a scientific workflow system. These systems handle both data storage (including meta-data and provenance -- where the data came from), and design and execution of computational experiments. If you are concerned about the complexity of the meta-data (e.g., pH value..) and would like to make sure to be able sort things according to this, you want to give "Wings" a try. You can try out the sandbox to get an idea: http://wind.isi.edu/sandbox.

In the annual RoboCup@home league they have robots following humans all the time and have been for the past few years. It's one of their standard challenges, e.g.: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKfP_Cz9oa0