If you believe that Apple is making a lot of money with their App Stores, sure. But they don’t. Even with the absolutely massive iOS App Store. The Mac App Store is tiny in comparison.
You and the other reply missed the part where even the iOS AppStore doesn't make as much money to warrant them running a whole ecosystem and shutting off musicians/producers/video editors/developers/hackers/enterprise users/people using Java stuff.
Apple has backed off on harsh decisions for much less than that. Remember Final Cut X? I bet the video editing community is much smaller than the developer community. Google, as an example, uses a lot of Apple laptops. They'd instantly stop buying them if that happened.
Until there's any sign of Apple wanting to close OS X, this is purely FUD.
Except they repeatedly said they're just above cut-even on the iOS AppStore. It's strongly doubtful that they'd do something like that purely for financial reasons.
I don't think they are that dumb, of course they know they would lose customers like us.
Indeed! Look at a novice Mac user, and you understand why Apple built the MAS. No matter how easy software installation was, the process was still difficult for most users (how to handle a bundle, package, zip file). The MAS has streamlined both installation and paying for an application.
Also, it's what people who bought a Mac because of the iPhone/iPad halo effect expect.
I don't think they'll lock it down to the app store either, but there are plenty of essentially-reasonable reasons why they could/would.