PhysX Cards - Future or Flop?

[Non Sequor]

It seems to me that with the move to unified shader model cards should make it easier to do physics work on the GPU since you should be able to allocate shader units to physics work without potentially bottlenecking a step in the graphics pipeline. At least, that's the way I understand it.

It really doesn't make much sense to have two pieces of hardware dedicated to doing vector work when one can do the job. I suspect that in the future, graphics cards will have an increasing amount of slack capacity for doing odd jobs like physics calculations as their power continues to increase and the returns on investing more horsepower into graphics tasks diminish.