When the D90 first came out and included video in what is ostensibly a still camera, I was quite vocal in saying this was not what most users wanted, and that this was going to divert significant R&D resources from still photography to video.
Well, that's what happened. If you look at most of what Nikon has done since then (D5000, D300s, D3s, D3100, D7000) you find that only two models didn't really put any effort into video (D3x and D3000), and virtually none of the others really pressed the still photography front forward. True, the D7000 has more still camera features than the D90, but they are features we already had in higher end cameras. Put simply, R&D hasn't been doing much still photography work as far as we, the customers, can see.
I've become less vocal about the video craze over time, mainly because it is clear to me that the camera companies are lemmings: once one (Canon) went the route of going all video in the lineup, they all would. It's darned difficult to get those lemmings to follow another track.
The camera makers believe that video is selling more cameras. That's debateable, but it's also asking the wrong question. The real question is what would sell more cameras, adding video or really pushing still photography forward? Unfortunately, we won't know the answer to that, as no one is doing the latter, so we have nothing to measure.
So the R&D train has left the station on the Video track. Okay, now what? We've got plenty of "full HD" (1080P/24/30) video implementations now, and the video makers are now responding with even better video cameras. So are we destined to watch the still camera makers keep trying to win people over with new video capabilities? Oh dear, that doesn't end well. To keep the train on the tracks the still camera makers would have to be adding 2k, 4k, 4:2:2 color, higher bit rates in the compression systems, slow motion, and a host of other high-end video capabilities, virtually all of which aren't all that interesting to the majority of DSLR users. Thing is, my iPhone 4 is a perfectly fine HD video camera for most situations, and more convenient in many ways than my DSLRs.
So I think the train is on the wrong track. While I've come to appreciate having a video capability in my still camera, at the D7000 level we're about as far as I want to ever go with that. Yet there are still hundreds of still camera capabilities, functions, and features that elude us users.
So, if you're a camera designer in Japan reading this, please read my Camera Redefined article as a starter and see what you can do to put the still camera train back on the right track. Please? Pretty please? Pretty please with Hello Kitty on top?