Well, it was what satoshi envisioned actually, they said a few large data centers would comprise all the "nodes" (synonymous with miners at the time). Its important to remember satoshi wasnt infallible, because I gemerally agree with your vision and if thats not the trajectory we are on then we should change course.
Discussion
I remember that, did he mention data centres? This was before the use of fpga's and ASICs, not long after pool mining was started if memory serves...I remember reasoning it all through and in the end, because the entire infrastructure depends on it companies would run nodes and mine, even at small cost, because it's one of the costs associated with remaining in business.
The quote, though im just grabbing this off reddit
The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users. The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be. Those few nodes will be big server farms.