> Many applications have to support what is essentially arbitrary 2D content which has to be laid out dynamically at runtime, and this is something different than the problems most games have to solve.
That sounds exactly like the problem most games have to solve. The age of fixed CPU speeds and screen resolutions is long gone. Games have to content with a plethora of dimensions along which to represent an interactive, dynamic, multimedia world.
I think OP meant it more in terms of layouting, like vbox can be inside a hbox which has also a text object, and every object can change sizes which will cause a recalculation in everything. It is surprisingly more expensive than the GPU accelerated rendering of many many triangles.
Games are complex, but the dimensions question is trivial there.
