I work for a local branch of a multinational company and I develop applications using MS-SQL Server backends/MS Access front end since 1997 (at that time it was the couple SQL 6.5/Access 97) plus some using MS-SQL/Visual Basic (beginning with SQL 6.5/
VB 5.0).
Before that it was either Access backend/frontend solutions (Access 2.0) or other solutions involving C/C++ connected to other database engines (in DOS, Windows, Unix and VMS environments). Though ADO was introduced with Access 97 (let's not bother with the clumsy and unusable Access 95), the standard interface was DAO using either Jet or ODBCDirect.
With the issue of Access 2000 (in the year 2000) Microsoft flooded its customers with alarming messages warning that DAO was now obsolete and will be discontinued soon and that ADO was the path to the future as well as a far better solution. At that time ADO became the default declared reference in VBA (i.e. if in a procedure you wrote
Dim rs As RecordSet, rs was implicitly an ADODB.RecordSet object). You had to manually include DAO in the references of an Access database, and were given advice not to do it.
I began testing ADO by converting a rather straightforward stock management program from DAO to ADO. It worked rather well and the conversion process was not very hard but the performances of the ADO version were terrible. Moreover some applications already in production were simply impossible to convert, mainly because they worked with transactions among several databases: something you cannot do with ADO. After a six month period of evaluation and tests, it was decided to keep working with DAO as long as this interface is available.
Now in 2011 SQL Server 6.5 has become a mix of SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 and existing applications are maintained in Access 2003 while new ones are developed in Access 2010. DAO is still the almost only used data interface, the only evolution being that ODBCDirect is not supported anymore. On the other hand, several applications were ported in
VB/C# .NET and use the ADO.NET data interface that is native for this development environment.
I don't know what will be packed in the future versions of Access but I'm very confident that DAO (then ODBC) will still be part of them.