I'd look at this the other way round: everyone should now be aware that a computer is a series of processing units connected by network links whose latency is many times that of a register or cache access.
Some of those network links are labelled "PCIe" or "SATA", and some are labelled "Ethernet" or "DisplayPort", but they're all high-speed serial links. A PCIe lane is only 8Gbit, comparable to 10Gbit ethernet.
This means that your computer "backplane" design can be de-constrained; you don't have to draw a hard distinction between elements in the same case and those in the case of the machine next to you in the rack.
A rotating disk is roughly able to saturate a 1Gb ethernet link. Maybe we should just go full SAN and put Ethernet connectors on the drives.
Some of those network links are labelled "PCIe" or "SATA", and some are labelled "Ethernet" or "DisplayPort", but they're all high-speed serial links. A PCIe lane is only 8Gbit, comparable to 10Gbit ethernet.
This means that your computer "backplane" design can be de-constrained; you don't have to draw a hard distinction between elements in the same case and those in the case of the machine next to you in the rack.
A rotating disk is roughly able to saturate a 1Gb ethernet link. Maybe we should just go full SAN and put Ethernet connectors on the drives.