We all hoped that HDR* was a short-lived gimmick, butafter several years we still are plagued by cartoonish scenery, ghoulish skin and apocalyptic clouds. Now HDR is coming to video. I shudder to think what House would look like shot in gimmicky overcooked HDR - but hopefully pros have more taste than that.
You might have said the same about color photography, since 99.99% of that is just awful. But HDR is not to blame for godawful HDR images. Blame bad artists.
Of course we do /all/ wish that bad art fads would just pass quickly. And there are bad excesses of HDR usage that are practiced as a fad. And we wish that would go away. My favorite pet peeve is /bad compositions in HDR/, which look as though the artist spent a long time crafting something (whether s/he did or didn't) without ever seeing how foolish they were.
But even after the dust settles, HDR is still standing there. HDR is simply a practical approach to photographic capture and rendering that says nothing at all about how the final product is to look. You capture as many stops as you dare to in whatever time is allotted. Then you take that and do whatever you want with it. We have new tools, such as tonemapping that are in primitive stages of development. But the tonemapping concept is a very general and practical one that applies to source images of any kind. It's just a way to map a source image to a target image, something we do every day.
Consider the future. High dynamic range displays are being developed that are intended to be capable of resolving 16 stops. Cameras will find ways to expand their ability to capture dynamic range, whether by adaptive localized exposure, or use of the electronic shutter for rapid multi-exposure sequences, or by new high dynamic range sensors.
HDR video fits into this technology horizon too. Put to one side the faddish excesses of today. It's got a future.
BTW -- I don't think there is any such thing as a "natural" look. My perception of reality comes from the adaptive processing my eye and brain do as I attend to different parts of a scene. There is no single white point or black point. I can see inside the room and out the window just fine. But I can't capture it in a single shot.