Gartner was late in pooping on the PC party.

Intel had already confirmed Wall Street reports that consumer PC sales were crapping out by the time the research house took down its forecast for the second half a half-hearted couple of points, reducing its growth projection to 15.3% against an easy compare.

It cited the uncertain economic outlook for the United States and Western Europe as well as sheer supply chain fear.

"There is no doubt," it said, "that consumer, if not business PC demand has slowed relative to expectations in mature markets. Recent dramatic shifts in the PC supply chain were in no small part a reaction to fears of a sharp slowdown in mature-market demand. However, suppliers' risk-aversion is as much a factor in these shifts as any actual downshift in demand."

It still believes "consumer demand is likely to remain strong" and that "businesses will find it very difficult to delay PC replacements further."

It contends that "the full bloom of the long-awaited professional PC refresh can't be more than a few quarters ahead" because "businesses that delay replacing much longer risk alienating employees, burdening themselves with more service requests and support costs, and ultimately facing higher migration costs when they eventually migrate to Windows 7."

It projects worldwide PC shipments for the whole of 2010 will still be up 19.2% to 367.8 million units.

It suggests that the netbook craze peaked late last year when the little beast accounted for 20% of sales and by late 2014 it won't be worth more than a niche-y 10%, replaced by low-end standard notebooks and threatened by what Gartner calls the media tablet, widgets with at least a five-inch touchscreen and a restricted-function OS like the iPhone, Android and Chrome, widgets it doesn't count as PCs.

It says a true tablet has a full-function operating system like Windows 7, Vista, XP or Mac OS X. It claims iPad hasn't impacted netbooks so far because of its price but figures imitation iPads will.