MS did already superseeded LINQ, kind of, via Entity Framework. But those are different things, really.
And so is LINQ compared to OLEDB vs ODBC. LINQ rather compares to SQL, it's a query language, it doesn't depend on OLEDB directly. If you have in mind LINQ uses ADO.NET, ADO.NET uses OLEDB and that connects to the database, you're not wrong, but ADO.NET can also adress ODBC.
The question in regard of VFP is, if MS will make an ODBC driver for VFP9 DBFs. It's unlikely, I think, as the product is deprecated, it will just push VFP one more step into discontiuation, so to say, as the latest official VFP driver is OLEDB only.
MS has stepped away from what other DBMS vendors did. They refused to go that route. The same goes for LINQ. OLEDB wasn't picked up by database vendors and OS vendors (Linux community, Apple), and LINQ was even less a technology that was also supported by other DB vendors.
And as the developers went more and more web 2.0, AJAX, HTML5, they also moved more to PHP or JAVA then towards ASP.NET
MS has to step back there to ODBC to stay with the main movements.
There still is OLEDB for NON DBMS. Quoted from
...The ability to make non-DBMS data sources accessible to database applications. ... Examples of non-DBMS data sources include information in file systems, e-mail, spreadsheets, and project management tools.
Bye, Olaf.