Bad Idea
I think that Ctrl-Alt-Del is just right; rebooting your PC is not something that you want to do by accident from your keyboard. Some desktop PCs did have a reset button on the front panel, in addition to the power button; that is the place for a single-key restart.
However, he is still partly right. The function of ctrl-C in some operating systems, performed by ctrl-Pause on a PC, which is still labelled "break", to interrupt the running program... is under-used.
Basically, ctrl-Break, as it's usually called, should be the way to tell the operating system to terminate a running program. It could instead do things like bring up the Task Manager in Windows.
Of course, currently, Windows traps Ctrl-Alt-Del, so that unlike with DOS, it doesn't restart the computer, it just gives you a secure way to reach a known place in the operating system. Thus, in Windows NT, it was used to bring up the password entry screen - and there's still an option for turning that back on in Windows 7.
If that had been its function from the beginning, then making it a single-key function would indeed make sense. But Windows NT didn't exist in 1981. So if the PC platform were designed with some hindsight, the best that could have been done would be to allow users to switch the interrupt from Ctrl-Alt-Del to, say, the Pause key - to match what was appropriate for the operating system they were using.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
