This is just until the last /8 is assigned to an RIR, right? There will still be plenty of IPs available in many locations throughout the world... it'll just be North America that will have a hard time of it.
Why North America? For the most part North America has mature deployment of Internet services. What is really driving IP address exhaustion right now is Asia where millions are coming online for the first time. They are the ones that will have a hard time when unused IPv4 addresses become scarce.