At least embedded seems to be embracing RISC-V like it's a race. Microsemi markets RISC-V tooling, Lattice semiconductor markets it, and basically all of Bluespec's marketing material is around their RISC-V development tools (for formal and differential verification of new RISC-V cores).

NVIDIA is already embedding RISC-V deeply into every one of their chipsets (all Tegras, all mobile discrete GPUs, all desktop discrete GPUs).

I don't see how somebody with any knowledge of the embedded industry could conclude that RISC-V will fail to penetrate that market.

As for consumer mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, you could make the argument that ARM has a lot of traction. However, the cost and flexibility benefits of RISC-V are not moot. For platforms like the Chromebook, you have a lot more flexibility in terms of the hardware platform. There's no practical reason why RISC-V would fail in Chromebooks.

Workstations, desktops, and general purpose (usually windows) laptops are a lot tougher. There is a lot of consumer value in the dominance of x86 in these markets so I probably wouldn't expect much to budge there in a short amount of time.

As for servers, however, there is no strict reason why any new ISA would fail. The biggest handicaps would be lack of out-of-the box distro support, platform inconsistency (huge problem for ARM, where you can't generally share images between boards), and low quality of compilers and language runtimes. If there is a good JVM port, a good v8 port, a good GCC port, and a good LLVM port, and maybe a few other VMs (like BEAM), there is no reason why RISC-V would be doomed to fail on servers. In fact, I see huge reasons why RISC-V would win the server market. Imagine an SoC which has the ethernet MAC, the remote management system/iKVM (with low-level access to the platform serial console) and a big wide superscalar OoO for running your server application on it. Imagine that the clean separation of ABI, SBI, HBI, and MBI drives up the quality, isolation guarantees, and performance of virtual machines. Imagine that you could have a TPU on the same die as the application processor, with a low-latency preemptible interconnect and unified memory.

I see RISC-V's technical decisions as almost uniquely suitable for the server market, and I think the server market is probably the most amenable to new ISA penetration.