I think Marko Ahtisaari is answering this question from an end-user perspective, not a developer one.
Also you are not using an exact quote. There is a difference between "obsessed people", and "people obsessed with ...".

From an end-user perceptive he may be right that the user experience is much more important than "the plumbing".
And if Nokia is using this Swipe concept in their series 40 phones, it will live on in some ways. Also a LOT of the MeeGo swipe interface concepts also seem to be used in the Metro UI in Windows 8, so some of the user experience may also live on in Windows.
But of course Nokia is not in control of the Windows UX (for windows Phone or Windows 8), and the marketing talk about Series 40, Qt and the "next billion" smartphone users is just that: Marketing talk.

What form that market for the "next billion" smartphone users will take on is totally not clear, as are the possibilities to make money with applications in that market. Will it be Nokia Series 40 phones with swipe UI's and a large ecosystem with Qt applications? Maybe, But I don't see anything like that happening just yet. (But I have been known to be wrong on many occasions)

Also user interfaces based on swipe concepts may look nice, but they haven't proven themselves yet. iOS has only a few swipe concepts, WebOS took it a lot further as does MeeGo and Windows 8. The problem is that swipe interface mechanics are hidden features, something that goes totally against the GUI ideas of the desktop computers. It requires some learning, and isn't always easily discovered when "exploring".
You see that in WebOS, that has a tutorial when you first start the device. Maybe in 10 ten years we look at that tutorial the same way as we do now with the mouse tutorial in Windows 3.1, who knows.

I'm very interested in these swipe UI concepts and hope they really do work well, but seeing is believing, and I haven't used MeeGo or Windows 8 yet. I do have a Palm Pre 2 at work, but those swipe concepts haven't blown my mind or something (it's "ok" in my opinion).
Will swipe UX continue in future devices? I think even that remains to be seen.