When you think about it, the market has already made a giant move toward this kind of transition, at least on the amateur level.
Almost all of our Atlanta shopping mall photo print outlets that used to produce proof prints and such have closed. Now families have their baby and vacation pictures shot on point and shoot digital cameras sent to relatives in email or displayed on galleries like Flickr, which is huge now. Alternatively they can buy one of those little frames and plug a memory stick into it to display them.
About 18 years ago Bill Gates bought the Bettmann Archive which was the largest collection of historic photographs out there, then set about scanning everything in the collection.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1995-10-11/business/9510110202_1_corbis-corp-bettmann-collection-doug-rowanAround the same time he purchased the digital rights to all of Ansel Adams archive. Also around that time he set up large flat screen HD screens all over his underground home in Seattle. He had written software where his visitors could type in what kind of art they were interested in - such as Renaissance painting, landscape photography, etc, - and they would see a loop of images on the big screen in their guest room. Obviously Gates thought this was the future, or a big part of it, and that we would all be looking at photographs that way by now, and he would have a head start on the technology and especially the content.
http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1996-04-03/business/9604020429_1_corbis-adams-photos-ansel-adamsObviously it didn't pan out that way for the contemporary artist, or hasn't yet. My feeling about it is that once you start viewing a big print on a big hd screen the first thing you think of as an artist (or viewer) is to see it animated, such as using multiple images in creative ways, and of course adding sound to it, which is so easy to edit and create on your computer these days in a really professional way. Then you are another kind of artist all together.
Just showing still pictures on a screen in a gallery or in your home is just going to look quaint and old fashioned. It will no longer seem like a precious object but rather an event, and if you don't have sound and movement, it would be a very boring event indeed. So, once you do move into that arena of flat screens on the wall ( and cheap, very large roll out versions of screens that are coming quickly) your competing with video and that is a battle you can't win. Cycling through reproductions of Cezanne and Adams in Bill Gates home isn't the same thing as photographers doing the same in a gallery context or people purchasing the content for their home I wouldn't think. But it may be coming eventually, I wouldn't doubt it, but it better be done in an interesting way or you will totally loose the next generation of patrons who have been brought up making their own videos and putting them on the web.
john