I think the BMI takeover could be interesting.
firstly LH prefers multihubs and relies on its feeder routes in Germany and other nations it owns airlines - am not saying they will leave things as they are but at the same time I think the BMI name will live on (it hasnt changed any of the names of the airlines it owns/has stakes in nor does it plan to do so) so i cant see why it will change the name of BMI to Lufthy - and in the same respect i cant see it chopping all SH routes or even domestic routes to simply turn it into a Mid Haul/Long Haul airline. On domestic routes the only competition is BA and if BMI pulls out to leave only BA, if its passengers are flying domestic to LHR in order to transfer to an international flight i would imagine a lot would choose BA for that onward journey
and secondly Virgin Atlantic is keen on a tie up or alliance of some sort as it is as we all know long haul and wants feeder routes in order to supply passengers - this will be a cheaper option for Lufthy rather than transform an airline with short haul and mid haul aircraft into another long haul airline competing with BA and Virgin and all the airlines that have opened up routes since openskies was given the green light.
If you read between the lines on this one, it was (and am sure someone will quote me wrong) SMB who wanted the sale as he had an option (agreed with Lufthy) to sell/force a sale even if Lufthy didnt want it at an agreed price and lufthy has had to pay a reported £318M (on top of money its spent recently expanding its Italian subsidiary, reported to put into Alitalia, purchasing Brussels Airlines, potentially purchasing Austrian and its 50% share of 1bn Euros of debt it has - plus its just announched a slight drop in profits at Lufthy and has a number of aircraft purchases to replace some of its lufthy fleet) so keeping BMI as is and forming a pact with Virgin would be both prudent and in todays economic climate an option seriously worth considering.
I live in the South and use LHR a lot and whilst LHR is at 99% capacity in terms of movements, the aircraft arent showing similar load factors - LHR routes cannot survive solely on generating passengers from the south or who prepare to travel from the north for 4-5 hours by road or rail to heathrow and cannot also survive without transit passengers by air.
To cut a long story short (too late) i dont think the BMI name will go but more importantly i dont think it is necessarily the nail in our or other feeder heathrow routes coffins!