I have an article coming out on the subject in my Tooling by Design column that appears in MetalForming magazine this fall. The answer is yes, it is inevitable - and necessary. Microsoft won that battle and became the industry standard, to the great benefit of its shareholders. I don't see the kernel market as quite that significant. I also don't necessarily see a monopoly as a good thing for the end users.
Competition generally forces more innovation.
Whoever owns the kernel used in this standard will reap similar rewards to Microsoft. In data exchange, Parasolid XT or ACIS SAT transfers are great for visualization and packaging, but modifying the dumb solids can be painful. While the geometry is the foundation of a CAD package, it really is a commodity. The high-end modelers could never become the standard without considerably lowering their costs because being a standard is all about numbers of users. They have both achieved large user bases but perhaps now feel deadlocked.