Torgan,
I think your view is a slightly dogmatic statement of the facts - about 90% true. There are SO many PATA based hard drive PCs in use right now and PATA probably also in IDE SAN network arrays that....the interface will be around for a LONG time. Right now I am reading reports about drive controller chipset incompatibilties with SATA (as far as physical hard drive swap out / migration) on different PCs - much more so than with PATA. The current speed gain of SATA1 - in practice is next to non-existant. When SATA2 comes out..yeah it will pull away from PATA. I am willing to put up with the restricted airflow and data transmission skew issues that come with PATA for now as I am not comfortable making that leap yet. Many others will feel the same way. The only place that SATA is a no brainer is in SFF PCs. There, any cabling room or airflow gains are a much larger issue.