I'm not excited about the "next" generation of cards because they'll be able to maintain a solid framerate at higher resolutions (I haven't been for almost ten years), I'm excited because they'll contain more and faster programmable shader units. That's where the magic sauce happens, and the more shader power you have the more awesome stuff you can do. And as other people pointed out, they're incredibly useful for a wide range of applications outside of pure graphics processing.

70 years? After 48 hours without sleep I make tons of mistakes, stare blankly at whatever I'm trying to work on for minutes at a time, and start seeing imaginary things darting around in my peripheral vision. Nope, much like Windows 95, daily reboots are necessary for reliable operation.