It requires some way to fund it, but that needn't necessarily be ETH. It also well could be, and they have first mover advantage. But, and it's a big but, I think the most important thing people who know much about crypto forget is:

Other people are not like you. Most people have still never even heard of Etherium. Most people won't touch something like that without explicit approval from a government. Which, obviously, is somewhat contrary to the point.

I think the real long term (20+ years) winners in this space will gracefully marry the old world with the new, until society has gotten used to these concepts and we can slowly deprecate some of the centralization.