I was hoping the next npm major version was gonna be a direct response to Yarn. Looks like they were busy with other fixes. Here's hoping 5.0 has some huge speed improvements and a deterministic install.
For now I'm going to view yarn as an excellent time-saving companion tool to npm. I hope the gap closes and yarn somehow merges into or officially supersedes npm. I'm just relieved that they haven't insisted on adding yarnfiles or some such to the FE gumbo.
That would've been kinda difficult considering npm 4 has been in development way before Yarn was open-sourced. They have the opportunity to close the gap with npm 5, though.
I think yarn also has downsides compared to npm. In npm if a dependency updates version patch, the potential security patch is now included in future npm installs. In Yarn you must manually update everything from what I understand