Sacrilege, on some points I agree with you. I definitely agree that time, money, patience, and skill are all huge factors in determining if someone will stick with tabletop wargaming.
I mentioned at the end of my post that tabletop wargaming does offer something different than video gaming. I'm not dismissing the depth of the wargaming hobby. I am saying that, from a
gaming standpoint, more and more people will choose to take the video game over the tabletop wargame as time goes on--especially since video games are becoming increasingly better at simulating war than wargames themselves.
Choosing video games over miniatures might not even be a conscious decision--that's something I want to stress. A military historian who finds himself put-off by DBA might go home and pop in Total War without making any active comparisons or choices between the two. A few decades ago, he probably would have stuck with DBA, since it was his only realistic chance at simulating historical warfare.
Wargaming is primarily about the simulation of a battle. Some games choose to take the simulation more seriously than others, but all these combat modifiers, special rules, dice rolls, and so on are included in all these games to try and make the combat more realistic. All of this can be done more effectively and enjoyably by a computer simulation.
There's definitely something really fun and special about painting, collecting, and displaying models, creating terrain, getting into fluff, and hanging out with other gamers--but all of these aspects of the wargaming hobby can also be found in other hobbies, like scale model painting, model railroads, trading card gaming, roleplaying, sports, etc. What wargaming primarily brings to the table is, well, wargaming. But Fire Emblem, Total War, and X-COM have tabletop games outclassed in that area.
This is what separates Monopoly and Clue from Hail Caesar and friends. Total War can simulate Hail Caesar ten times better than actual Hail Caesar. On the other hand, nothing is really being brought to the table by a digital version of Monopoly, because there's no real simulation: everything is already very straightforward.
That being said, I suspect as we become more addicted to technology, many non-niche board games will start becoming less popular too. I've had family nights where we just played Words With Friends instead of getting out the Scrabble board.
As for "art," one of my friends said something about painting miniatures that really bothered me at the time: more or less, painting pre-sculpted miniatures is essentially a glorified paint-by-numbers. I now sort of agree with her. All of the models have been pre-sculpted and cast, and almost all of them have to do with war, fantasy, science-fiction, and pin-up women. Very few people besides us take miniatures seriously as a form of art.
Lastly, yes--Warcraft is a Warhammer clone. GW was working with Blizzard to produce a Warhammer RTS, but then decided to drop the project. Blizzard took the scraps and made Warcraft. Not jumping onto that video game bandwagon was one of the worst mistakes GW ever made.
What I'm saying is, understandably, controversial for a tabletop wargaming site. I'm just trying to bring something new to the table other than "GW is horrible"
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Jamros, your notion of changing the "GW is horrible" theme in this thread is by stating that "an ideal GW in a perfect world would get eventually killed by the video game industry"!?! HAHAhaha : 
