One thing to bear in mind perhaps is that in the long run the block reward goes to zero and miners only receive income from transaction fees. The block rewards they receive now can be seen as a means to bootstrap the entire system by providing incentive to develop the infrastructure.
That is exactly what happened. The network is bootstrapped. Satoshi was a genius. While the block reward could be phased down faster then Satoshi's plan and bitcoin would still survive, Satoshi's original plan is the plan that will go forward (THANK YOU!).