You can buy a $6,000 digital back for a ‘medium format’ camera, too (to replace the use of polaroid plates).
What price points are we talking about for equivalence?
Four digits, and falling. My Nikon DX40 cost about $1400 and is practically indistinguishable from film.
I worked at Kodak around digital movie film scanners/printers. Quality work required a $0.5M machine to digitize the film, and another $0.5M machine to write the edited image back to film. Now you can just buy a RED cinema camera for around $0.01M (aka $10K) to shoot the “footage” directly, and screen it with the theater’s $50K digital projector; the camera is flatly better than film, and the projector (while still inferior to the trained eye) is considered superior in the general public’s perception.
Upshot: you have to be doing very high quality, large-format photography for a wealthy & keen-eyed audience to find any discernable difference between film & digital ... and at those prices involved, the digital option may very well be superior.
Bonus: “film” is practically free for digital; I can dump hundreds of 3Kx2K images on a single cheap SD card, then move ‘em to a notebook in seconds for near-endless storage. Even if I could discern the difference between film & a good digital camera (and do have the eye to), I’d sacrifice a bit of quality to up the odds of getting a really good picture content-wise. Some of the best photos I’ve seen were from a grainy 1-megapixel camera.