Will the Mac Finder be phased out?

California design firm Frog Design wonders about the fate of the Macintosh Finder in light of Mac OS 10.4 Tiger's system wide Spotlight search. Basically, their argument is that Spotlight's far-reaching search capabilities, combined with the inclusion of smart folders in Tiger's Finder make the practice of navigating through a nested hierarchy of folders seem inelegant and unnecessary.

I don't think I'd go so far as to say that the nested folder metaphor of the current Mac OS Finder is on its way out, but I have found that Spotlight and smart folders have changed the way I use my Mac.  I've started to rely on Spotlight more and more heavily, both for finding items I may have lost as well as items I could locate in an instant. For example, I have a number of GarageBand loops on my iMac that I've downloaded from a number of sources. They all live in a folder called "Loops" within my home directory's Music folder. Recently I wanted to use a particular one. I didn't know exactly where in the Loops folder it was, but I knew it had "tunnel" in its title. A quick Spotlight search brought it up without my having to leave GarageBand. Later I wanted to hear a certain song in iTunes, and instead of launching iTunes and navigating to that song, I simply searched its title in Spotlight and started it up in an instant. That's when I realized the real logic behind Spotlight.
Up until then I had been thinking of it as Sherlock's successor, and used it only to locate files that I had misplaced. But more and more I'm using it to navigate the Finder. I can see how you could just leave everything in a heap on the top level of the hard drive and let Spotlight do the work of finding that one file your interested in.

I'm also making use of smart folders. As a parent, I'm a little out of control with the photos of the kids. I created a smart folder that finds images last modified today. At the end of the day, these are the photos I email out to far-flung family and friends.

Now my years of Finder training (and fastidious nature) forbid me from making the large pile on my hard drive. But the idea seems a little less horrifying to me with Spotlight and smart folders at the ready.