Provided that the gesture based interfaces keep evolving, I am pretty sure we are bound to see an impressive evolution in the way the "traditional" device control works much sooner that we think - gestures and, optionally, visual feedback on your TV or even tactile feedback from the touch panel, will likely cover most of the "normal" remote control needs without the "traditional" hard buttons.

And let's not forget that it's not just the touch gestures - when you actually need to have something in the palm of your hand - XBOX Kinect already has moved from research/prototype to production resulting among other things in Microsoft Media Center control using air gestures.

It now might look clumsy - can you imagine a patriarch frantically waving his hands to skip forward an annoying commercial? - but in a couple of years we will likely have something much more sophisticated and the patriarch instead of going through the painfully mind-numbing process of learning the IR codes from the old remotes will only need to teach the new system how to read the facial expressions :)