>>Nope... the battle now is between SL and Html5....

Others might argue that this "fight" mainly concerns <5% of the smart phone market predicted by Gartner to fall to <4% by 2014, with the real battle between iOS and Android. Theoretically you could do a SL app for Android but phone developers have been drawn to optimized tools for a particular platform- I say "optimized" because graphical apps can drain a phone battery very quickly without specific optimization, including SL apps for WinPhone fwiw. You can already get optimized cross-platform products, e.g. database tools with versions for both iOS and Android.

>> within 5 years, there will be no SL, ASP.Net, Lightswitch, etc.... there is a merging of technologies taking place and I believe the ultimate inheritor will be a markup based, generated language that runs both on web and desktop and combines all these features into a single platform with no need for anything else.

That would be something, wouldn't it? Perhaps the desktop metaphor won't survive either as people learn to love their devices that make much better use of voice and speech-to-text, since those are more natural for humans than tapping on keyboards laid out to suit technologies that were profoundly obsolete for most of our working lives.