despite of the fact that this sounds promising, i doubt onlive will become the mainstream platform for gaming because most of the good games are published by sony and i really don't think microsoft and sony and nintendo will do nothing while being taken over by onlive in the gaming industry. There is no doubt this thing works like a charm in a small scale like a demo but there hasnt been any data whether it will work as fine handling a big scale of user whether the server can support such a big scale of user. Also, this thing relies too much on the speed of internet. At the moment, most countries may not even have stable connection yet especially the developing countries.

However, this thing shows us the trend of gaming is shifted toward DLC. In the future, we may not rely upon DVD, blu-ray to play games. Every games are downloaded from the internet to play in our console/pc. In other words, i do expect this thing become the future gaming platform gradually (in the future generation). Simply killing console/pc as the main gaming platform now is just suicidal because the pc/console industry still generate good incomes and it is the bread and butter for some big companies.

in a nutshell, i do not think the replacement of console/pc as main gaming platform by onlive will happen tomolo or in next few years because there are a lot of consideration/factors come into play when it comes to introducing onlive to general public.