It's not going away, forever. It just will no longer be the standard. Eventually.
I love film. I was a cameraman in the International Cinematographer's Guild. I'm also very young--I was always "the kid" on set--and I made a name for myself as a film guy. Not a video guy, but a young guy who knew about film. When I was working it was the turnover between film and digital and I hated video, because it wasn't ready. It is now, so my opinion has changed. But I still love, love film. I have a whole box full of 16mm and 35mm raw stock short-ends that I was saving for my own projects that have now become expired, but I never had the heart to throw them out. And I love black and white. I worked as a lighting cameraman, and I saw thing in light and shadow, not colour, and would light that way. That's why I love a lot of films from the 1920s like Sunrise. That's also why I hoarded a lot of Kodak b&w film when they were phasing it out. I still buy issues of Black and White Photography, but many of the examples aren't on film--and it doesn't matter. That both pains and joys me. Digital photography today is essentially indistinguishable. So what are we mourning? Our emotional attachment. And no one was more attached to that than me. I still have reels of undeveloped black and white 35mm motion picture 400 foot spools that will never be used, because I am old fashioned.
But I also recognize that being old fashioned is not an excuse to get in the way of improving the medium. 35mm photography may remain a niche hobby for the time being, but it's purely an emotional thing, and therefore to me "highly illogical." If there is no distinguishable difference between the digital equivalent, then what are we holding on to? It was kind of a sad day when I realized that--but it was also so overwhelming exciting, that for a fraction of the cost anyone could anywhere do the same thing that was concentrated in the hands of a few elite--that I couldn't help but tell film to fuck right off and not to look back, emotional as it was. It still has its uses--archival, for example, since digital storage is still rocky--but in terms of pure photography? No. Sorry. Film is a dinosaur. And I never, ever thought I'd be saying that in the year 2012. 2020, maybe. But things have progressed so fast that really, it has increasingly little use, unless you have unlimited millions of dollars to throw at it--and even then, maybe not.