You're unnecessarily narrowing the meaning of the word "touch interface". There's a lot of possible use cases, and by no means the stylus is "old" and the thumb is "new". There's things you just can't do comfortably with your fingers. Then there's the question what you want more: using your fingers only or doing the things you'll always need a pointing device with pixel precision for.

It's two different ways of thinking, two preferences. Making it sound like there's an evolution from old and bad to new and good just isn't correct.

Personally I do believe, though, that they will eventually sacrifice the ability to run full blown desktop applications. They'll move to capacitive to keep the press happy. Engadget doesn't care about full Debian on a phone, nor does the mass of consumers.