As far as I am concerned the jury is still out on whether that will be the case, and if it does turn out to be, whether the system will have bloated beyond the capacity where it could realistically be operated by a large pool of individuals. The ability for the operational infrastructure to be cheap and widely dispersed is THE thing which gives Bitcoin it's backing and strength in my opinion. As that erodes so does my confidence in the solution.
Most of the bitcoin network is not the technical network of computers running Bitcoin protocol. Bitcoin is in actuality
a socio-economic power network of hundreds of supernodes and 100,000s of active nodes. That the majority of them don't have the Bitcoin client, is only economical, division of labor. The important thing is, Bitcoin is open source, so that the economic majority gets to choose the rules, not the coercive minority, and this will forever remain so, because of the design.