The End is Near for Caps Lock?

Quite possibly.

From a piece in Slate...

What's most shocking about Google's announcement isn't that it's scrapping Caps Lock—it's that the button has lasted this long. Caps Lock originated with typewriters. The first typewriter to include both upper- and lowercase letters was the Remington No. 2, introduced in 1878. (Before that, typewriters printed only in uppercase. Stop shouting at me, writers of the 19th century!) Uppercase letters were typed by holding down a "shift" key that would literally shift the carriage so that a different part of the type bar—the part on which a reverse uppercase letter was printed—would hit the ribbon. The problem was, it was hard to hold down the shift key for more than a few letters. So typewriter manufacturers added a "Shift Lock" button that would keep the carriage elevated until the button was released. It was a useful innovation: Typewriters didn't have options for italics or bold or underlining, so capitalization was the only way to emphasize words.

The first computers didn't have "Shift" keys at all since all text was uppercase anyway. But when mass-market personal computers like the Commodore 64 and the Atari 800 were introduced in the late 1970s and early '80s, manufacturers tried to make them as similar to typewriters as possible.