They are two different things. When I play D&D I get a kind of entertainment I cannot get with WoW (I play both), and when I play WoW I get a kind of entertainment I cannot get with D&D. I don't play D&D on thursday nights, just like I don't sacrifice saturday afternoons to WoW.
My whole roleplaying group plays both D&D and WoW, and we have a blast in both, just in different ways. MMO's have not replaced tabletops in any way for us, just like watching a movie hasn't stopped me from reading books.
I, for one, think that MMO's are a good things for tabletops, since they get people who would have probably never heard of such things slightly closer. Sure, your average Arathi Basin lvl 19 twink PvPer isn't likely to end up playing D&D, but maybe some of those guys hanging out at the -former- Stormwind Gardens and roleplaying their characters will get tempted to check on it.
So no, I don't think MMO's will ever replace pen & paper roleplaying; sport videogames didn't replace actual sports either. At the most, we'll end up playing D&D with augmented reality, which would be extremely cool by all accounts.
But in retrospect, I think this is more a child vs adult thing. Very few proper adults I know play WoW. Those who do are all single and kind of man-childish. My proper adult friends (those with jobs and families) can barely spare the time for a game a week, which suits us just fine.
I get the feeling that the bulk of the paizo forum members are adults, or at least borderline so.
My experience from watching friends with families is the total opposite. For those married with two young children the reality is that the family is the focus. The kids went to bed at 8:00 though they cried and screamed and begged until about 8:40. The wife crashed at about 11:00 (her 'me' time takes place early in the morning). Its now 11:30 and you finished dealing with the task she left you when she crashed - you have until roughly 1:00 in the morning to do whatever you want and this hour and a half is really the only 'me' time you get during the day - an MMO fits right in with this schedule in a way few other gamer type activities do.
As much as I haven't almost all the MMOs out there currently I would drop them in a heartbeat for a decent group that met once a week. My passion is table-top, my wife HATES anything I do on the computer. Even as an IT guy and my constant need for learning and advancement I get burnt out playing on the computer.
My wife is overjoyed that I finally found a group to play with on the weekend as it gets me out of the house and away from a computer.
MMOs will not replace P&P I don't see it happening anytime soon. P&P offer so much more in creating an imagination for young gamers. My son who is 6 loves watching and listening to the adults play. Although he doesn't understand the mechanics of what is going on, the story telling keeps him in awe.
When will Goblin Works have any results for their Pathfinder Computer Game?
They've been working on it for a long time with no commercially viable results.
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I have been gaming RPG since 1977. That sentence is one that I see on many message boards and blogs intermixed with another, "computer gaming (mmorpgs) are replacing pen and paper games".
I can honestly say I've never seen anyone else say that. Link please?
MMO's will replace TTRPG's the same year that apples replace oranges.