Perhaps firewire, despite advantages, will will end up on the losing end just like the Beta video format did to VHS. Not enough computers offered a firewire port while USB became ubiquitous.
Firewire got neglected (no keyboards, mice, flash drives, and very few printers); the move from FW to FW800 required a different connector (USB doesn’t); Apple dropped FW here and there on its products, and Apple was the biggest adopter of it I think (TI invented it though). FW 3200 will probably smoke USB 3.0 (because USB’s realtime performance has generally failed to reach its claimed specs), but without some kind of killer implementation / product for FW 3200, it’ll all fade away like a bad fart.
Well, the “U” in “USB” suggests that that was the goal all along :)
However, where Firewire is used, Firewire is in hard-core use. Professional video cameras, portable hard-drives catering to professional users, professional audio interfaces, etc. In other words, places where USB 2.0's real-world half-speed bandwidth (even compared to just FW400) and tying up of the computer CPU cycles causes real issues.
I'd like to see how USB3 compares to FIrewire 800 - I'm no bigot. And of course, Apple & Intel (supposedly) have "Light Peak" cabling in the works...