Eliminating paper CD's could happen, in time. It all depends in certain advances, not only in software's but hardware's. Maybe an "electronic paper" or something like that.
There are many architectures today that requires 3d, for efficiently manage its conception and construction. Like the Chanel Mobile Art by Zaha. Which is, basically and digitally speaking, a piece of Nurbs. Same for the Nest from Herzog. Not always valid for the most common Architecture.
Christian: I think, one of the most powerful features of Vw is the solid modeler, and the abilities of attach records to it + classes. Those features let you make any object an Information Container, full of geometry from the Modeling engine, and graphics attributes from the classes. I think that's one of the things people does not understand, not necessarily you, about Vw.