It's getting to the point where meeting in person is more about inertia than about necessity. We're no longer waiting for a silver bullet; the technology is already there in several different ways. Email, IM, teleconferencing, videoconferencing, video streaming, secure network traffic, and so on. Most of these technologies are pretty darn mature. You can't get by without EVER flying around, because face time is important, but companies can reduce the frequency. And they are doing so -- but slowly.

The sticking point right now is probably the human factor. Adoption is always slow to spread. Part of it is just time; you need the old guard to move on so that the new guard can adopt these technologies.