A huge problem I see with responsive/adaptive design today is that, all too often, it treats "small viewport" and "mobile" as being synonymous, when the two concepts are orthogonal. A mobile device can have a high-resolution display, just as a desktop user can have a small display, or just a small browser window.
Responsive designs need to design for viewport size, and nothing more. It's not mobile, it's a small display. Repeat that to yourself about a thousand times.
What's holding back single-design philosophies isn't display size, it's user interface; for decades, web designers have counted on there being a mouse cursor to generate events - mouseovers, clicks, drags. That's not how it works on touchscreen devices, and we need some facility - JavaScript checks, CSS media queries - to cater to touch-based devices as opposed to cursor-based devices.
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