Yes but... With the exception of games, there's really not much you can do on a 2008 PC that you can't on the 2000 PC that I am typing this on now. Email, web browsing, word processing/spreadsheets, IM, music/movies, etc, the bread-and-butter stuff that most people do most of the time hasn't changed over that period.
Things are the-same-but-better now. HDs are bigger, broadband is, err, broader, screens have more pixels. There have been no major shifts of the magnitude of "the web being invented". You could have linearly projected 2008 from 2000, I reckon, even in the tech sector which is the fastest moving of all. It would have been much harder to forecast 1998 from 1990.
That's kind of true - yet you could with a powerful PC of today leave Vista's voice recognition running all the time, almost dedicating a core to it, if you will. You couldn't previously as it was too demanding. I can leave many browser windows open because the overhead of many windows of interpreted javascript is minimal. You can use expose and similar as if they were free because the OS can offload to a beefy video processor. I run a Windows Server on my Mac laptop in a virtual machine barely thinking twice at what a marvel it is, at work we run 8 virtual servers on a physical box that takes up a quarter of the space of our 6 year old server.
People in general might do the same things, but that's not because the hardware can only do the same things.
Things are the-same-but-better now. HDs are bigger, broadband is, err, broader, screens have more pixels. There have been no major shifts of the magnitude of "the web being invented". You could have linearly projected 2008 from 2000, I reckon, even in the tech sector which is the fastest moving of all. It would have been much harder to forecast 1998 from 1990.