Hard drives keep a nice thin barrier between the head and platters, but floppies and tapes do not. The biggest problem with a hard drive is impact while it is spinning. If the head is parked, you're usually safe, but knock one off a pile of books onto the table while it's reading and say "good bye". You can throw an SSD at a wall and not hurt it.
As for "flash" drives, I don't think the long-term will be based on the current technology at all. They're already manipulating "bits" at the atomic level. It isn't even close to a commercial product yet, but it will be. The beauty of technology is knowing that no matter how fascinating what we currently have is, somebody is already working on stuff that will blow it away.
I'll agree that flash isn't up to the job of running a server, but for a PC it works just fine. My mini is so light I can hold it in one hand and it is on in less than a second after I open the lid. That beats the hell out of a laptop with a hard drive. The tablets are all flash-based. They're doing fine. My server has 9 TB of hard drive space. Even if I wanted to run it on SSDs I couldn't because they don't exist in anything near that capacity. Yet the server has the same amount of memory as the mini has in SSD space - 24GB.
Different job, different tool. And by next year, today's stuff will all be obsolete legacy hardware. I've got machines going back into the mid 70's and I get them out every once in a while to marvel at the technology of the time. I'm not sure if being a geek is a blessing or a terminal disease. Either way, I like it. My middle daughter (18) was out at her grandparents' house last week and Gramps was trying to configure a new laptop to hit the router. I walked her through finding the security key and then just said "Okay, make the connection," and she knew what to do from there. Saved me from having to get out of bed and go look at a Win7 box.
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