Heh, I suspect hardware folks would like a CPU which programmed well with Verilog or VHDL, and I know that trying to make a hardware description language accessible to software folks has been a pipe dream for at least 25 years. However, I don't think Verilog was the solution for Itanium, and the useful niche for FPGAs seems increasingly limited to low Size Weight And Power realms.
The FPGA projects I've seen (using very high end FPAGs, not commodity/cheap ones) seem like they're always bumping up against clock rates and making timing as soon as they try to do anything approaching what you can do on a CPU or GPU. Of course there are exceptions where the FPGA does really simple and parallel things, but FPAGs aren't a panacea.
There was a company called reconfigure.io that came the closest to an accessible HDL (they compiled Go to VHDL/Verilog) but seems to have died and their founder is now with ARM.
I recently worked with another company trying to solve the same problem, but I suspect I should keep my mouth shut due to NDA crap. Regardless, I suspect we're easily another decade out before anyone makes FPGAs accessible to the masses, and I can't think of many problems where I would take an FPGA over a GPU, but there are still some.
The FPGA projects I've seen (using very high end FPAGs, not commodity/cheap ones) seem like they're always bumping up against clock rates and making timing as soon as they try to do anything approaching what you can do on a CPU or GPU. Of course there are exceptions where the FPGA does really simple and parallel things, but FPAGs aren't a panacea.