Many people are complaining that this year’s Consumer Electronics Show was a bore, but blogger Horace Dediu has a much more interesting spin on it.

This year’s show, Dediu argues, marks the end of the PC-era: it’s finally being disrupted. The basic concept of disruption is that a low-end offering (in this case, tablets) emerges to displace existing solution (PCs). The reason this takes place is that the current solution has improved to such an extent that it provides more performance than a majority of users able to usefully employ.

This means that the iPad and its many clones were not really the main story of the show. The main story — which almost nobody covered — was that this year’s CES marks the beginning of the end for Microsoft and Intel.

This transition has been a long time coming in the PC industry. Ironically enough, both of these two big players have seen the writing on the wall for almost a decade. But as is so often the case, incumbents find it immensely hard to disrupt themselves.

Even more so than Intel, Microsoft has known the tablet was on the way. In 2001, Bill Gates stood up at Comdex and introduced Microsoft’s first attempt at a Tablet PC to the world. But they just couldn’t get it right — the company has rarely been able to bring innovations to market without seeing someone else do it first, and this instance was no different. They tried jamming a PC into a smaller form factor, which entirely missed the point. Their tablet should have been about disrupting the PC market with something light, cheap and simple. Instead, Microsoft tried to make it do everything.

Intel has also struggled to find a way to profitably build processors that can power these handheld devices. Their latest financial results seem extremely healthy. But dig a little deeper — the only line of business that is barely growing is the Atom, Intel’s mobile processor. They managed 8% revenue growth last year and no growth at all last quarter. This is in a year when tablets and smartphones exploded. If Intel had got it right, the Atom would be booming as all these smartphones and tablets come online. It would pick up the slack as the desktop processor business declined. Instead, so far, Atom has been a failure. Intel could only push it down as far as a few netbooks, but these are going to be the first to be crushed by the wave of tablets.

Both Microsoft and Intel have suffered from the same problem that most successful companies face when dealing with disruption. They cannot find a way to profitably invest in low-end offerings. Think about it from Microsoft’s point of view: now that Windows 7 has been developed, to sell another copy, they don’t have to do a single thing. Because of this, it becomes very hard for any executive to advocate the complete development of a low cost OS that will run on tablets: not only would it cost Microsoft a lot to develop, but it would result in cannibalization of its core product sales. Intel has the exact same issue. Why focus on Atom, or an even lower-end chip, when there is so much more margin to be made by focusing on its multi-core desktop processors?

This would be fine — except for the coming extinction of the PC.

The wheels are just starting to fall off. At CES, for the first time, almost all of Microsoft’s OEM partners abandoned Microsoft exclusivity; and Microsoft’s next-generation operating system has abandoned Intel exclusively for the first time. There’s no reason to believe that either of the two companies are going to be able to turn this around. On one hand, ARM processors are perfect for powering these handheld devices. Manufacturers can customize to their heart’s content. And Android is on track to dominate the operating system space (though maybe not profitably). Both ARM and Android — Armdroid — are providing everything that tablet manufacturers need, and doing it more effectively and at a lower cost than Microsoft and Intel are able to.

We will be able to look back and say that this was the CES that saw Wintel fall and Armdroid rise up.

James Allworth is a Fellow at the Forum for Growth and Innovation at Harvard Business School.