OS X Lion preview ably demonstrates that disc is dead

That's a particularly poor attempt at online journalism. Making the developer release available through the Mac Store makes a lot of sense - it lets Apple reduce the physical packaging and posting costs and given that it's for developers, shouldn't be a problem for them.

I would like to add that I bought Windows 7 online from Microsoft and downloaded it, so Apple's hardly doing something new here - MSDN has had similar downloads for years.

The disc isn't dead, it's not even sleeping - most people will still want to burn their downloaded copy of a final release OS to disc for reinstall media.

The article and accompanying survey implies that SSD is also dead. SSD has great qualities that make it a fantastic cache for the cloud. Including SSD in machines also means that, for now, fully enabling orthogonal persistence and all of the engineering entailed to create a truly bootless OS can be delayed. (And you can quote me on this -- if Apple truly lives up to Steve Job's vision, OS X or its successor will someday not need to boot.)

There's going to be a considerable chunk of engineering to get there. In the interim, there's too many upsides to having SSD locally to act as a cache for the cloud and as a persistent store for reboot for it to go away soon.

Physical media has been dead to me since 2002 when I got my first iPod. However, until it is common for motherboards to have ability to get onto the network and pull an iso of an operating system removable media will not totally be dead.

Big company with all its bets on downloadable purchases makes product available for download alongside physical media.

Vapid tech journalist follows along, declares all physical media to be dead in hopes of harvesting pageviews.

Gutter journalism!