Will jQuery ever not be relevant? It's still the easiest way to accomplish most basic tasks, and 90% of the websites out there make use of it in some fashion or another. There are now a plethora of frameworks for building front end web apps, but for basic scripting I don't see anything replacing jQuery anytime soon.
jQuery was built in a time when doing a simple ajax request required 2-3 code paths just for cross-browser compatability, and some of those code paths fairly verbose. Today most basic tasks are short and easy with just standard APIs that every browser understands out of the box. The need for jQuery has certainly diminished (usage not so much).
