As Curbed (via MacRumors) notes, a permit request to Santa Monica’s planning commission doesn’t identify the retailer that wants to build this thing, but it sure looks a whole lot like a showcase Apple store.

Bonus for whatever store’s employees do end up working here: “Secure bicycle parking” in the basement. If you’re into that kind of thing.

“When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm,” Jobs said at D8 last month. “But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars….PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of x people.”

Jobs stopped short of predicting just how quickly this transition will occur, but in a research report published today, Forrester (FORR) hazards a guess: By 2015, nearly one out of four computers sold in the U.S. will be a tablet. According to analyst Sarah Rotman Epps, tablets will outsell netbooks by 2012 and desktops by 2015.

“Catalyzed by the introduction of the Apple iPad, the tablet market will kick off with a modest 3.5 million units sold in the US in 2010 but will grow at a whopping 42 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between now and 2015,” she writes. “Tablet growth will come at the expense of netbooks, which have a similar grab-and-go media consumption and Web browsing use case as tablets but don’t synchronize data across devices like the iPad does.”

Five years from now, Epps says, only laptops will have a greater share of the PC market (42 percent). At that point, tablets will claim a 23 percent share, and the only thing keeping desktop sales alive will be processing-heavy consumer needs like gaming and video editing.

“Although notebook/laptop users will still be outnumbered by desktop users in 2015, laptops will represent the lion’s share of new PC purchases from now through 2015,” Epps writes.

“Even though consumers may use tablets for many of the same functions for which they currently use laptops–media consumption, email, Web browsing, and light productivity–they won’t replace laptops,” the analyst concludes. “Instead, tablets will become a consumer’s other computer that’s more portable within the home and outside of it.”

In other words, Epps thinks Steve Jobs is right when he says the PC is destined to become a “truck.” But she disagrees that the tablet is the car that will replace it. In her view, it’s the laptop that’s the car. Which I suppose makes the tablet a bicycle–not necessarily a bad thing from a sales point. Almost everyone owns a bicycle, right?

BoomTown managed to sneak into the green room at the Web 2.0 Summit last night to get a little chit-chat in with Lance Armstrong, the seven-time winner of the Tour de France cycling race title.

Armstrong is now probably going for his eighth one, much to the chagrin of France (yes, the whole country, as Armstrong notes in one of the clips in the video below), part of his “comeback” from a three-year retirement.

Here’s a video of him talking to me about his health and fitness Web site, Livestrong.com, and some snippets from his onstage interview with Web 2.0′s John Battelle, along with some crazy bidding for a bicycle he signed: