Well, I just bought a new laptop and guess what - it comes with a VGA port!!! I think they need VGA for compatibility reasons... so I don't see VGA disappearing any time soon.
Yeah, it's very frustrating. A friend came to visit, he told me he got a new laptop and he'll bring it so we can watch some of his Blu-Ray concerts. I bought a HDMI to DVI cable as my 2311 doesn't have HDMI, to only find out that it has a VGA port only. WTF ! I had to go to the attic to get the VGA cable out of the box. BTW I've heard the main reason for keeping VGA ports on laptops is for compatibility with projectors, and that's mostly on the business orientated ones (Lenovo in the case) but I see most of the gaming and multimedia ones having HDMIs.
Having VGA there is understandable, but throwing in a HDMI or DP isn't too much to ask. Well just a matter of time before it goes, we have seen legacy ports like parallel port, serial port and even PS/2 ports going away.