B&M retailing comes down to revenue per square foot.
Over the years, many companies have tried different ways to maximize their revenue by increasing their product offerings while minimizing their warehouse and showroom costs.
Showroom stores have been one of those attempts:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_Products
We may be ripe for an update of that model. (Quite possibly by, yes; Amazon.)
Sears, for one, long ago cancelled their catalog mailings but have more recently linnked their B&M and online storefronts into a unified operation; not only do they do ship-to-store internet sales, but their B&M staff can look up and special order any item right in the store. All they are missing are self-serve in-store terminals pre-linked to online extensions of the displayed products. (For example, in the HDTV area the terminal would access other TVs in stock at the regional warehouse so they would only have to display one model in a given brand's family. For example they could display a 60in model and order the 55 and 46 equivalents via the terminal. Make the terminals big, catchy and easy to use and they'd be a better use of space than stock three sizes of the same TV.)
B&M retailing is no more dead than pbook publishing.
But both need to update their business models and internal workflows to survive.
Which I suspect a few will do because, to paraphrase: "Nothing focuses companies quite like the prospect of Chapter 13."