Tangential question: PCIe is a pretty future-proof technology to learn/invest in,
right? As in,
it is very unlikely to become obsolete in the next 5-10 years (like USB)?
In fact, "zero~th generation" of thunderbolt used optical link, too. Also both thunderbolt and DisplayPort reuse a lot of common elements from PCI-E
I wouldn't expect that to be mainstream until after optical networking becomes more common, and for consumer hardware that's very rare (apart from their modem).