DiFranco will replace Stephen DeWitt, who’s being moved over to run the webOS business unit. That unit is becoming increasingly important to the PSG now that webOS, the operating system HP got when it acquired Palm last year, will be put in PCs in addition to phones and tablets like the TouchPad.

Bloomberg News says that Jon Rubinstein, the former Palm CEO, will run product development for the PSG unit. DeWitt will run a new unit focusing on pushing webOS. Both will report to Bradley, who was himself once the CEO of Palm during a period when it was called PalmOne, and joined HP in 2005. Bradley has also recently been handed responsibility for building HP’s business in China.

It’s the latest in a series of moves by CEO Léo Apotheker to put his brand on HP’s operations. The last shake-up was about a month ago, when CEO Peter Bocian, CIO Randy Mott, and executive vice president Ann Livermore stepped down, and Livermore joined HP’s board of directors. And as reported earlier today, Bocian landed at J.P. Morgan Chase.

DiFranco had been in charge of HP’s Solutions Partner Organization (SPO), and he’ll continue to oversee SPO until a replacement is found. DiFranco’s new brief will be to run marketing, sales and operations of PSG in HP’s premier markets, the United States, Canada and Latin America, including both consumer and business PCs, phones and tablets.

When attending the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, BoomTown moderated what turned out to be a fascinating panel discourse of what was to come in the tech sector.

No, it was not a gathering of Trekkies.

The CES SuperSession panel, titled “What Will They Think of Next? Consumer Technology in 2025,” was less Jules Verne than a logical analysis of where gadgetry is headed by looking at both the past and the present.

Overall consensus: Touch screens everywhere, 3-D imaging in wide use, no device wires, ubiquitous high-speed wireless networks and more.

Of course, there were some edgier ideas, like being able to tell exactly when it is going to rain to the minute, via massive computing of weather patterns.

In addition, one of the panelists, Greg Harper, brought back what was popular in 1994, the same number of years back that 2025 is forward. Yep, he dragged out for display the Apple (AAPL) Newton and brick-sized cellphones.

The panelists were: Stephen DiFranco, VP and GM, Americas Consumer Group, Lenovo; Gregory Harper, co-founder, Gadgetoff and president, Cerberus; Len J. Lauer, EVP and COO, Qualcomm (QCOM); Sean Maloney, EVP and GM, Sales and Marketing, Intel (INTC); and Phil McKinney, VP and CTO, Personal Systems Group, Hewlett-Packward (HPQ).

Here’s the video with interviews about 2025 with all of them–and don’t miss the very funny poster at the end from Microsoft (MSFT) about its vision of the future: