Games Workshop still produces fantastic models. The new plastics are far FAR superior to anything they put out even 10 years ago, metal or not. They often make the incredibly hubristic claim that they produce the world's best model soldiers.
A number of smaller outfits can quible with that in terms of pure sculpt quality, but no one is even coming close to what GW has been doing with plastic. Their closest pure competitors are arguably Privateer Press and Mantic (who basically just make models cheeper to sell to people to play GW IP games with). The mantic plastic kits lack detail, and sculpt quality varies dramatically. The PP sculpt quality is generally very high, but the plastic they have chosen to use is not very good, being very difficult to work with. In addition, the modularity of the GW kits blows anything else on the market away (that I've seen, anyway).
Basically, to counter Haven's point, there is NOTHING cheap about their plastics, either in cost, or quality.
3d printing is an interesting one.
This company has been producing it's general run figures via 3D printing, and I can honestly say the results are incredible (owning pretty much every sculpt they've released).
Games Workshop is a goliath, with a huge fanbase. They've ploughed a lot of money into computerised sculpting and stuff like that, some of which has paid off, some of which hasn't. Whether they're worried about 3D printing, I don't know, I think that it will be very interesting to see how they handle their IP at that point. The idea of a CAD file with the sprues being leaked to the internet, and people being able to print their own SPAZ Marine armies at home is a very realistic one for the next 30 years or so. I suspect that this is a significant element in the reason they have been launching lawsuits left, right and centre towards places like chapterhouse studio, which make models which (in my mind) at least utterly violate copyright in a moral sense, even if the legal waters are far more muddied.
As for the GW brick and mortar store, well, I think in the UK, the population density is high enough that it still works. The store also doubles up as a childcare facility for parents when shopping. It ensures that the only 'toy soldiers' a kid is really ever exposed to are those of GW, and provides a key component for clueless relatives to buy gifts. In 20 years, we'll see where they are.
In places with lower population density (North America, Australia) and often much higher rents (Australia) the retail model seems to be a failure.
I see 3d printers being a serious threat to games workshop if they continue to drop in price.
