Certainly digital will catch up with film, it's caught up with APS 24mm film, and it's about there is 35mm, but medium format can't be touched yet.
You can't actually compare tonal range and color accuracy with film, because if you got it drum scanned, the Dmax range is, or is almost 4.0, compared with about 2.5? (i'm not to sure here) for CCD scanners. The good things about digital cameras are that they tend to capture more shadow details than film, although they overexpose easily which therefore also means that films capture more highlight detail.
Digital backs on medium format cameras essentially capture as much detail as a good CCD could be expected too. This isn't the same as drum scanning, and certainly yields image quality nowhere near what you'd get for drum scanning.
Infrared photography seems to work well on digital, but other special purpose photographic persuits fall flat. Orthochromatic and ultraviolet photography for example.
The advancement of digital in photojournalism is partly due to the web. Since everything hits the internet long before tomorrow's newspapers, nobody has the time to invest an hour
Other things to note, most digital cameras don't have a bulb setting on the shutter, and don't have exposure times longer than 30 seconds, making them pretty much useless for things like shooting star trails.
There's also hope that technology will one day advance such that we can get even more detail out of film scans than we do today. Almost the entire motion picture industry shoots in film for this reason.
Digital, once it's captured has as much detail as you'll ever get in a million years.
As has been said, digital is cheap. George Lucas saved millions of $$ doing the new Star Wars movies in digital. Then again, with such a large budget anyway, it makes the rest of the industry wonder why he jumped platform so early.
In terms of what the eye can see, that should be about 200 ppi. Assuming you have 6/6 vision or better.
Digital vs. Medium or large format? If digital can't beat them on gallery size prints, there's no way it'll beat them on an 8X10. The better single shot capture digital backs only capture 16 megapixels. A 3000 dpi drum scan of a 6X6 (2 1/4 X 2 1/4) piece of film will yield 43 megapixels.
Of course, for static objects there are "scanning type" digital backs that will get you 190 to 200 megapixel files in RAW format. The thing here is that just like stitching photos together, it only works if your subject doesn't decide to move away.
On the extreme end of film, Lotus View Cameras makes 20X24 cameras which is scanned would get you the equivalent of gigapixel images.
In short, quality wise, today's film is still was ahead of digital, it's all about time and money.
Just my two cents worth.
