What will actually happen with protection mechanisms I don't know; certainly Unix-style mechanisms are used to ever more places with say HSA's idea of accelerators and CPUs being aware of the same virtual memory maps. Compatibility is a very strong force here. On the other hand there's a lot of stuff happening with the memory protection disabled as you described. My predictions here are going to be less educated than many others', to be honest, because I deal with embedded systems whereas most of the exciting stuff here happens in servers, I'd guess (but I can tell that in automotive embedded systems of all places not only do Unix-style processes gain traction right now but so do hypervisors with actual multiple OSes, some of them POSIXy, sharing chips. So this is a data point showing a trend in the "more of the same" direction.)