Maybe, but I guess ideally, the user would want to be able to say: "open my 2008 tax report" or "send Jack the photos of my trip to Paris this year". This fits more closely to a Spotlight-like search plus actions, a direction that Apple is clearly moving to.

Sure, things are imperfect now: Spotlight search does not catch everything and Siri often messes up. Coming from hierarchy-oriented interfaces to documents, it sometimes feels like throwing your data in a dark pit, where it is impossible to retrieve it again. But if they can nail this stuff correctly some day, we surely have come a long way!

In some cases it almost works perfectly already. I never put e-mail in IMAP folders anymore, since Mail.app's search functionality allows me to find stuff quicker and more effectively.

I agree that good search is essential and helps a lot with not needing to organize stuff anymore. Making good sense of automatic metadata (with photos, stuff like geotagging and iPhoto's Faces) will help even more.

But there's still often a need to browse, and I haven't seen many successful implementations of tags yet, so I'm still skeptical that it's much more intuitive than folder. I know Gmail does it well, but I rarely use their web app, and not many email clients support it. Meanwhile I've never seen anyone use tags in, for instance iPhoto.