I think you, isor and maybe a couple of others are touching on the real crux of the matter; Guys like Hendrix, Page, Clapton, EVH and the like were, in their time, the guys every kid picking up a guitar wanted to imitate. All of those 80s hair bands really wanted to be Zeppelin. Every kid wanted to sound like Page in the 70's as much as every kid in the 80's wanted to sound like Eddie Van Halen.
Page and Clapton defined blues rock while Hendrix played a more progressive style of blues rock. David Gilmour, Robert Fripp and Steve Hackett were pushing non blues based playing (prog rock) in the mainstream while EVH popularized finger tapping techniques and Randy Rhoads was delivering crushing speedy and memorable solos behind Ozzy.
Meanwhile you had Jeff Beck, Frank Zappa, Joe Satriani, Steve Hillage, John McLaughlin, Al Di Meola, Allan Holdsworth, Larry Coryell, Stanley Jordan and a number of other top notch players pushing the boundaries of sound and technique with guitar with a fraction of the following or imitability for whatever reasons.
I agree that SRV is likely the most recent "guitar god" with widespread appeal and kids modeling their playing after him. Not to say plenty of kids didn't pick up the instrument wanting to sound like Dimebag, Hammett, Slash or any number of other great players. But the talent pool now is much larger than kids had access to in the 70's, 80's and early 90's. (BTW, I'm not a big Slash fan at all but cite him only because I think GnR were influential to some people.)
Anyway, you can google and listen to any artist mentioned in this thread within minutes. It wasn't like that before the internet. You had to buy the albums or cassettes or dupe them off of your friends. You were only exposed to so many artists via radio and eventually MTV and/or word of mouth. It's really a circumstance that's prevalent in entertainment in general in that there's so much of it out there now that it's hard to pinpoint idols/gods as the pool of options for all of us is so broad at this point.
I agree with Jack White because Seven Nation Army is as copied or teased by live bands I go see as Smoke on the Water was in the 70's and 80's. That shit's catchy but really Jack White's playing is particularly derivative of Jimmy Page. Just as SRV was derivative of earlier blues players as well but he had a proficiency few reach. Hendrix was derivative of Buddy Guy but again, he took the style to new levels. I named Derek Trucks because there's not many great slide players these days and he touches on the greatness that was Duane Allman. Buckethead is in the same category as Vai, Malmsteen, and Satriani as being tremendous on the instrument but fairly inaccessible to a mainstream audience. Most, if not all of the great jazz players fall in that same category. That shit don't play in the sticks as it were.
Sorry for the ramble but hopefully my point comes across. Guitar is far from dead, it's just people have so much more music available to them now that it's hard to say "so and so is the best!" Which is a stupid statement anyway given all of the styles of music and musicians out there. It's all about taste. Some of the guitar gods in the first post reached that status because they were essentially pop stars before pop stars became passé. The guys like Satch and Malmsteen don't fall in that category but they're guitar nerd guitar gods in that most people wouldn't recognize their songs or their playing the way most people could recognize and name multiple Zep, Hendrix, Pink Floyd, or Van Halen songs.
