The Internet likes to spoof on politicians who make digital faux pas, such as former Vice President Al “I invented the Internet” Gore and Internets-loving former President George W. Bush.

And former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, who was tragically killed in a small airplane accident Monday, was no exception, never able to shake a speech in which he called the Web a “series of tubes.”

Said Stevens at a hearing in Congress in 2006:

“The Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.”

The death of the hard-charging 86-year-old Republican pol, of course, revived the many online videos of him related to this non-geek malapropism, and “series of tubes” made it as a trending topic on Twitter.

Here is one of the more famous videos from Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show,” and another rap based on Stevens’ speech:

“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?

As promised, All Things Digital will today begin posting the full videos from our eighth D: All Things Digital conference, which took place last week.

As a kickoff, our number-one choice–and overwhelming request from readers, by far–is the opening-night interview Walt Mossberg and I did with Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs.

As usual, the iconic Silicon Valley legend did not disappoint, engaging passionately in a lively and news-filled discussion about a wide range of topics, including his thoughts on Apple’s fight with Flash-maker Adobe (ADBE); the impact of the iPhone, iPad and apps marketplace; his tumultuous relationship with Google (GOOG); the AT&T (T) situation; his ruminations on the future of the PC (it’s apparently a truck); and, most of all, his determination not to “let it slide.”

By that, he meant not to let anything slide.

And, indeed, Jobs presented a picture of an innovative exec firmly in charge and certain of his convictions about the future of computing. It is especially important to listen to him, since he has played such a key role in its history.

So, without further ado, here is Steve Jobs unplugged at D8: