The big issue I had with the article was mostly the cloud computing part. Sure, many people read their e-mail online, or use Facebook online all the time. But thats really the only big "cloud computing" I see going on in consumer space currently. Some of the more geek inclined people are also moving word precessing, spread sheets, photo management and such to the cloud. Outside of that, there is still plenty of room for desktop apps to thrive in the OS X App Store for a number of years to come. I definitely don't see cloud computing being a reason to say the App Store will be mostly empty in a few years.

Another factor to that is the amount of people who simply don't bother, or can't obtain low latency, fast broadband connections required for decent cloud computing experiences beyond simple e-mail and status update posts. I'd find the experience on Google Docs with a spreadsheet completely unacceptable over dialup, satellite or 3G due to the latency issues. And I think many others would too, causing these people to revert to local desktop apps, with maybe a push of data to the cloud.

I'm more inclined to agree with Bruno here, in that the main impact of the App store will be less consumers looking to other sources to obtain apps. However, I really don't expect Apple to get to a point where they block non App Store apps from running anytime soon. Not under the current conditions anyhow. If they relax the conditions that an app can get into the store, then maybe I see it as a possible future. For now, I believe the pro market is still big enough to attract Apple, and closing off apps would definitely cause a majority of the pro users to abandon the platform, including myself.