Pixel artists will probably use nearest-neighbor scaling to display their art on high-resolution screens (so one pixel would become a sharp 3x3 block of pixels, or 4x4, 5x5, etc). That is already the technique being used to create games with an “old-school” aesthetic on modern gaming consoles.
I don’t think that drawing 1920x1080 (or larger!) images pixel-by-pixel will ever be practical, and it probably wouldn’t even look like pixel art to the eye at that point.
Most property has value without artificial legal limitations.
I agree that 5-10 years is probably too short of a period for intellectual property to be protected. Honestly, putting an arbitrary span of time on the duration is a suboptimal way of accomplishing the goals of copyright law. Why not protect an artist’s creation as long as he or she is alive, and then release it into the public domain upon his or her death? One of the main problems with the current system is that corporations (e.g. Disney) can monopolize culturally-significant works for decades after their creator’s death.
We’re willing to shift our clocks by an hour twice a year to “save daylight,” whatever that means. Correcting for 500 years of clock drift is a far more tangible reason. It’s rather pessimistic to assume that the people of 500 years from now would be unwilling to implement this.
The future of casual gaming, sure. That’s already true, I would say. However, there are a lot of games that are far better suited to be played on a couch or sitting in a nice comfy chair with a mouse and keyboard, and PCs/consoles are much better suited for that. If anything, the iPhone and iPad have only stolen the market from portable devices like the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP. “Real” consoles are hardly threatened.