Only someone not related to typesetting can say that LaTeX is dead. Exactly the opposite is true. Even though there are good alternatives these days such as InDesign and (I hate to say that:) MS Word (which now has a much better formula editor and OpenType Math fonts), great developments are taking place, for example LuaTeX. Not directly LaTeX but TeX: I have built a high quality database publishing system based on LuaTeX: http://speedata.github.com/publisher/
I think that page could benefit from some examples created by speedataPublisher; now I only see a list of features and requirements, not what I'm able to create with it.
