Rockwell does have a point when he says that.. With digital, there is totally no chance of up scaling the image you have just shot. If its 12mp, it will be 12mp for life. If 5 years back you were using a D2h, your pictures today would be considered technically obsolete. Contrast this to film - because film is of an analogue nature, its quality is limited by the size of the grain and the resolution of your lens. Because of this, film holds a large amount of latent information. With future advances in technology, we should be able to harness more information out of film. Digital on the other hand is limited by the state of technology; it is only able to harness up to what technology can feasibly provide. If they shot the wizard of oz back in '39 on digital (assuming they had the technology to) we will not have the blue-ray version today, don't say VCD quality..
Rockwell's concept of RAW(in the article) is different from what most digital photographers would usually understand it as. The catch is that he expects future technological advance would allow him to rework his "RAW" files to reproduce images of better quality. With today's "RAW", this is not achievable.
That said, film scanning technology hasn't progressed much in recent years.. partly due to the falling usage of film and to the convenience direct digital imaging brings about; besides that is where companies can earn the most in (keeping consumers in a perpetual cycle of upgrading). However, on the off chance that some new imaging technology is developed which enables film to be scanned at higher resolution with better quality, then people who have kept their films properly over the years can once again take them out and say "my image on film from 30 years back can still fight with what today's digital cameras are able to produce"
