I suspect two things will happen; either LED's will get better at fading in a more natural way like incandescents, and/or - dimmers will get smarter and better at handling them. One of the simplest fixes I can think of would be to have a way to set a "starting point" for dimmers that is configurable. For instance, the dimmable LED's I use today don't come on until about 38%, but they dim down to about 10%. It would be nice if I didn't have to hold the dimmer button while it went up to about 45% and flicked on.
I know LED's will get better at producing that naturally pleasing warm light we desire; Phillips does a coating on their bulbs; cree uses a mix of colors and a light sensor to know where it's at; eventually they'll get better.
Also - I suspect it won't be horribly long before lighting makers start to stray from the design of the standard edison base bulbs, and start making whole fixtures that are intended to basically last 10 years then have the entire fixture replaced. This means the heat concerns can be handled much easier, and the designs can get the most out of the LED light by placing the LED's and any needed diffusers wherever they work best, not wherever they need to in order to fit the socket design.
I'm sure that the interest of backwards compatibility will drive the systems to be as interoperable as possible - but there will certainly be better dimmers out there for handling this. It'll be interesting to see which HA vendors are also on top of this adapting their systems.
That said, I suspect my SAI dimmers will be fine for the next 10 or so years before there's something noticeably better - and I'll wait until I move into a new house to worry about moving to a new product.
Just my suspicions...
