It's interesting...I'd definitely concur with the assessment that most of what's happened in the tech world over the last decade has mostly been progressive refinement of existing ideas and technologies, and a lot of it isn't all that exciting to me personally. At the same time, though, I do think it's a good point that progressive refinement has made some interesting tools much more accessible to ordinary people, which dovetails neatly with what I think the really encouraging and exciting development this decade has been. For the last half of the 2000s and the first few years of the 2010s, it was really looking like the all-industry push to make technology (and computers specifically) into a consumption-only delivery channel for corporate mass media was almost unstoppable, and worse, nobody seemed to have any interest in stopping it.
I remember having conversations with folks every time some rag would publish the latest prediction on "the death of the PC" and them arguing to me that nobody needed computers for anything more than passive media consumption and facebooking anymore, so obviously people would just ditch them entirely for locked-down devices like tablets and smartphones, and that viewpoint being treated as gospel. Now, ten years after the introduction of the iPad, not only are PCs not gone, not only are people digging back into hardware hacking for all sorts of hobbyist applications, even Apple has finally had to concede and offer a way to install custom software on their fondleslabs. (Of course, you have to buy a Mac for the privilege, but even so...it was practically unthinkable for years.) And the pushback against social media and data mining in the last three or four years has been equally heartening. The battle's not over yet, but it's encouraging as hell that we even got this far, considering where things were at ten years ago.