Nvidia will just end up doing the same thing AMD did, finally start paying royalties to RAMBUS...
AMD pays up
Nvidia had to realize that they would have to pay at sooner or later, obviously they chose later, which could be a huge mistake, because I doubt they get off with the same type of deal that AMD did, $75 million over 5 years...
also, most mainstream laptop and PC users will be totally ignorant to the fact that their graphics processors are failing, they'll continue to send their laptops or desktops off to get fixed, thinking it was another part that failed, motherboard, LCD screen, etc., totally oblivious to the fact that they just happen to own a GPU that is almost guaranteed to fail at some point...
I have an 8500GT and 8600GT, but will probably be upgrading very soon, my desktop card will probably hold out until then, so I'm not too worried about it...