It is not just that the pictographic language of icons -, folders, floppy disks, file cabinets, trashcans, glue bottles, scissors, clipboards etc. - is drawn from a context largely irrelevant to large segments computer use today such mobile devices, educational contexts and home uses. Nor is it that elements such as the floppy disk are twenty years obsolescent.
The problem with the pictographic language rooted in skeuomorphism is that it lacks a grammar. It has no rules of combination. There is no icon for copy and paste - let alone one for copy from context a and paste in context b.
It is not entirely an accident that alphabets have been replacing pictograms for three millennia. They are more flexible. Likewise, the iconography of industrial buttons is rapidly disappearing both as a relevant context from the workplace, and as a human interface. Industrial interfaces are increasingly a screen and a keyboard [a keyboard is our industrial interface to an alphabet].
What is the most useful feature of the iOS interface? It would be hard to argue for anything other than the touch keyboard. It has two important features. Each icon represents a symbol rather than an action. Those symbols have rules of combination which allow the expression of complex abstractions.
Your roommate can text "Scrunchie on door." They don't need to download "The Let Someone Know You're Getting Laid App" from the app store. Neither do you.
The icon and skeuomorphism will continue to lose ground simply because they are too brittle for general purpose computing. There will be specialized contexts where they persist - just as pictograms are a useful way to describe the way the Grants Mill Road winds over the hill. The sign before two successive turns shows two successive turns.
Today, we are in a future where Grants Mill Road has been straitened as it heads down toward the bridge, but some interface designer has not only retained the sign but had it painted to simulate a brushed aluminum finish and shading to simulate an embossed surface illuminated from the upper right.
Most skeuomorphism is cutting two inches off the potroast.
http://mikeschinkel.com/blog/conventionalwisdomassumptionsan...