Re: Watching the Old Guard fade...
I think you may be looking in the wrong place. Take cars as a comparison. Initially there was lots of innovation by inspired engineers. Benz gave us the car, Panhard gave us the steering wheel, Ford gave us the affordable car, Citroen gave us the monocoque and front wheel drive and Issigonis gave us the transverse engine. And since then very little has actually changed. For all practical purposes, all mass market IC engined cars sold today are developments of the Mini and even electric cars are really just the same with a different "engine".
And so with personal computers. Lots and lots of innovation in the early days, lots of people trying different notions from Sinclair's "Cheap at the expense of everything else" to Xerox's "Sod the cost, give 'em the works" approaches. But while lots of things have happened in the background, I would argue that nothing much has really changed in desktops/laptops since the original Macintosh, nothing much has changed in handheld devices since the iPhone and nothing much has changed in applications since NCSA Mosaic. Yes, Google does rather more than Altavista did, just as a modern Range Rover (yeugh) does more than an Austin Maxi, but the differences are all second order.
As a result, the fun of innovation has largely gone from computing. Forty years ago someone with an idea could hope to change the world, now the best they can hope for is a cubicle near the windows with a chance to be one of a team of four hundred working tirelessly to improve a widget.
tldr; There are lots of equally creative intellectual successors. They just aren't working in IT, which has, basically, been done.