If you think of Nvidia as a hardware company, you're only three-quarters correct — at least according to Ian Buck, Nvidia's senior director of GPU computing software, who sees an even greater role for software as his company's products evolve.
"It's important to note that software and hardware really are one," Buck told …

Deprecation

NVidia could easily say that version X is the last major release and then it goes into maintenance / deprecation mode. People can choose to stick with it in its final form or port to OpenCL.

I don't see this as being any different from (for example) Microsoft and Winforms, or Sun & AWT. Yes they'll give it token support but all the good stuff will go into another API which happens to be the industry standard.

CUDA is Nice

As a person who wrestles with both CUDA and OpenCL I prefer CUDA by far. One can do a lot more in CUDA. OCL is basically meant for shaders, it's not the real deal. CUDA tools are excellent. No one comes close to that on the GPU side.

Give credit where credit is due, Nvidia is the ONLY company which is innovating in the area of processors. x86 is an ancient kludge, RISC has been around for a while. Only NVidia's Fermi is something new and it's quite fast and useful. In many fields it's the only game in town. The oil industry is a good example.