One could spend a countless amount of time trying to come up with all the possible angles that M$ could steer this ship into. The problem is that all these theories are conjecture based on bad behavior in the past which doesn't quantify directly here since this situation is somewhat unique.
M$ has a very nasty habit of shooting itself in the foot for things that are part of it's inner organization. Mojangcrosoft isn't part of that internal structure yet, so the self shooting aspect can't happen in the near future.
You tend to look at it's end goal (worst case, everything described above), and then pair it with the achievable goals that are near term, things they could do without having every MC'er lose their shit completely and start public boycotts that get press, etc... and then they trickle changes towards that end goal just little by little till their end goal is complete. simple. It just takes time. But, by that point in time, alot of unknowns could have happened by then. Hopefully someone came out with the next minecraft that's better, more moddable, made in qbasic, whatever. You just don't know.
Any large behemoth wants to contain all of it's stuff in a nice clean box, thus xbox Live would obviously be that box. (no pun intended). That would be one of those things that would make every mc'er loser their shit and protest. sorry, just a fact. So, I doubt the always on and no servers thing would happen anytime soon. I'm sure it'll happen this way: New rewrite, months if not year or more in making. Oh sorry, this new version's code requires the online aspect due to the fact that there's so much data to be transferred. A offline mode would not be possible. 1-2 days later, cracking group proves their full of crap by releasing a patch to game that allows offline mode a la simcity. so yeah, I can see that. And I will feel fine pirating minecraft at that point.