Hadoop is hardly our only hope -- off the top of my head there is Yahoo S4 for expressing streaming topologies of large-scale data processing. There is Google's Sawzall language for efficiently 'sawing' through and aggregating stats about of large amounts of data. Databases like MongoDB are slowly enabling the FLOSS community to process larger and larger datasets which previously was very difficult for someone other than an engineer with a Google datacenter, GFS, and BigTable at their disposal. And that's just scraping the surface of great, Free and open-source projects available. AWS and Google App Engine are making it affordable for the common man to run computations that we could only dream about just a decade ago. I, for one, am very excited about this and think we're doing just fine.
Indeed there are plenty of alternatives, that was the subtle theme of my post, but unfortunately I didn't have the space to go into any more detail... Follow up piece!
