My experience is limited, but there are now at least two hardware startup accelerators (in the bay area), I've watched a robot project go from idea to kickstarter to seed funding, another robot kickstarter go viral and get funded, watched a robot company raise money from the inside, and seen the explosion of open source designs and software for robots. All this in the last two years.
I don't think we're that close to your vision of the robot revolution (we need stronger AI first) but there are many places where robots are now technologically and financially viable where they weren't 5 or 10 years ago.
I previously posted the following about when will the robotic revolution will occur, to which I got some pretty good answers: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3630139