It's kind of funny that the other day he was complaining about low-res screens in laptops... when the degradation/stagnation in laptop screens is in a large part due to the race to the bottom he's arguing is unequivocally a good thing today!
Those things are not mutually exclusive. LCD manufacturers can both 1) make better displays with higher resolutions and 2) reduce the cost of producing said displays.
So, there can be a 'race to the bottom' of high quality products.
Example: I bought a AMD 3-core CPU a few years ago for about $120. The passmark score for that CPU is just under 3,000. Today for $120 I can get an AMD FX-6100 for $120 which gets a passmark score of 5,400. So, nearly twice the computing power at the same price.
In another year that FX-6100 will cost considerably less, thus giving the same horsepower for a lower cost.
Race to the bottom does imply making things cheaper but it not necessarily true that it's also worse. The XBOX 360 is now half the price it was when it was first released and yet more reliable and uses less power.
Cough, $400 Android tablet with that screen. Frankly, I'm betting the Nexus 10 would be something Linus would be happy using if it were in a laptop form instead of a tablet. Super high res, it would be quite small for a laptop. Linux runs quite happily on ARM.
