Thats why software defined networking, Openflow etc, are going to take off, as you can get back control of the protocols and what is going on, and avoid the vendor lockin.
What do you call Arista? Also there is a lot of interesting "virtual appliance" networking going on.
I agree the right choice today is almost certainly a C or J router and probably C or A switches, but e.g. hardware load balancers like F5 seem to be losing out to software in most deployments (increasingly).
I built a decent sized network with Zebra 15y ago, which was pretty obviously the wrong tech, but interesting.
I've been hearing this for a decade. It's still not true. I'm not sure why, either.