Yes, a crisis within the next 2-4 years is going to force the issue. This crisis will cause a major disruption to the way the internet works and will affect every industry. The sad thing is it didn't have to come to this, notice that this article refers to discussions from 2002, if the IPv6 transition had been managed correctly we would now be completing the transition instead of barely beginning it.
A coworker has been transitioning our stuff to IPv6. It has been an eye-opening experience. It's not just IPv4 with a bigger address, it's not even just IPv4 with a bigger address and some stuff, it's a new Internet.
When you understand that, the sluggish rate of deployment goes from "What the hell?!" to "Yeah, of course this has taken time!" In fact I'm sort of coming around to the "what were they thinking?" point of view and beginning to think that IPv4.5 (IPv4 + bigger address packet and minimal changes to make that work) may yet have been a good idea. "Everybody" said "hey, we have to have a new protocol so let's like design it to be the awesome!" but it remains to be seen whether the problem of "running out of addresses" can actually carry the weight of all the other wishlist that has been encoded into IPv6. (I'd say "probably yes, but it was closer than it should have been".) Reminds me of some of the (X)HTML standards that basically failed for the same reason... "well, as long as we're rewriting the standard language of the web, let's go nuts and embed all kinds of stuff..." unto death, as it turned out in XHTML2.0s case.
Or it will cause massive adoption of large scale NAT, which will further centralize the internet. Because such centralization favour few, huge, powerful players, we may not see the transition at all.
I just hope the current attitude of Cisco is proving me wrong.
I just wish Cisco would fully support IPv6. Their regression of the protocol on their routers, firewalls, leaves something to be desired. But, I guess regression requires users - chicken/egg thing.
