'ipv4 hardware' (huh? what IS that, btw? does this imply that ipv6 is not in 'hardware'? how strange to describe things)
Not sure what he was on about but, yeah, IPv4 is always in ASIC on big gear and part of the slow IPv6 adoption curve is that there is a lot of big expensive gear deployed with IPv4 in ASIC and IPv6 is only done on the anemic CPU.
We're probably 2 of 5 years into the required replacement cycle, but it is significant. One of the wrinkles with the recent Cisco "Internet is too big" bug was that the hardware has ASIC slots for 1 million IPv4 entries, 500,000 IPv6 entries, but we already have 490K IPv4 entries and if there were as much IPv6 adoption, the combined totals would break out of ASIC today and nobody wants to think about going to the CPU and main memory for core routing, ever.