Let $\mathcal{X}$ represent your input space i.e the space where your data points resides. Consider a function $\Phi:\mathcal{X} \rightarrow \mathcal{F}$ such that it takes a point from your input space $\mathcal{X}$ and maps it to a point in $\mathcal{F}$. Now, let us say that we have mapped all your data points from $\mathcal{X}$ to this new space $\mathcal{F}$. Now, if you try to solve the normal linear svm in this new space $\mathcal{F}$ instead of $\mathcal{X}$, you will notice that all the earlier working simply look the same, except that all the points $x_i$ are represented as $\Phi(x_i)$ and instead of using $x^Ty$ (dot product) which is the natural inner product for Euclidean space, we replace it with $\langle \Phi(x), \Phi(y) \rangle$ which represents the natural inner product in the new space $\mathcal{F}$. So, at the end, your $w^*$ would look like,
$$
w^*=\sum_{i \in SV} h_i y_i \Phi(x_i)
$$
and hence,
$$
\langle w^*, \Phi(x) \rangle = \sum_{i \in SV} h_i y_i \langle \Phi(x_i), \Phi(x) \rangle
$$
Similarly,
$$
b^*=\frac{1}{|SV|}\sum_{i \in SV}\left(y_i - \sum_{j=1}^N\left(h_j y_j \langle \Phi(x_j), \Phi(x_i)\rangle\right)\right)
$$
and your classification rule looks like: $c_x=\text{sign}(\langle w, \Phi(x) \rangle+b)$.
So far so good, there is nothing new, since we have simply applied the normal linear SVM to just a different space. However, the magic part is this -
Let us say that there exists a function $k:\mathcal{X}\times\mathcal{X}\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ such that $k(x_i, x_j) = \langle \Phi(x_i), \Phi(x_j) \rangle$. Then, we can replace all the dot products above with $k(x_i, x_j)$. Such a $k$ is called a kernel function.
Therefore, your $w^*$ and $b^*$ look like,
$$
\langle w^*, \Phi(x) \rangle = \sum_{i \in SV} h_i y_i k(x_i, x)
$$
$$
b^*=\frac{1}{|SV|}\sum_{i \in SV}\left(y_i - \sum_{j=1}^N\left(h_j y_j k(x_j, x_i)\right)\right)
$$
For which kernel functions is the above substitution valid? Well, that's a slightly involved question and you might want to take up proper reading material to understand those implications. However, I will just add that the above holds true for RBF Kernel.
To answer your question, "Is the situation so that all the support vectors are needed for the classification?"
Yes. As you may notice above, we compute the inner product of $w$ with $x$ instead of computing $w$ explicitly. This requires us to retain all the support vectors for classification.
Note: The $h_i$'s in the final section here are solution to dual of the SVM in the space $\mathcal{F}$ and not $\mathcal{X}$. Does that mean that we need to know $\Phi$ function explicitly? Luckily, no. If you look at the dual objective, it consists only of inner product and since we have $k$ that allows us to compute the inner product directly, we don't need to know $\Phi$ explicitly. The dual objective simply looks like,
$$
\max \sum_i h_i - \sum_{i,j} y_i y_j h_i h_j k(x_i, x_j) \\
\text{subject to : } \sum_i y_i h_i = 0, h_i \geq 0
$$
Best Answer
In the case of high dimensional problems, linear SVMs tend to perform very well, like in the case of text classification (see for example the classic paper Text Categorization with Support Vector Machines: Learning with Many Relevant Features). It is shown how in the case of a high dimensional, sparse problem with few irrelevant features, linear SVMs achieve great performance.
Also, Geometrical and Statistical Properties of Systems of Linear Inequalities with Applications in Pattern Recognition shows how the higher the dimensionality, the more likely it is to find a separating hyperplane.
Non-linear kernel machines tend to dominate when the number of dimensions is smaller. In general, non-linear SVMs will achieve better performance, but in the circumstances referred above, that difference might not be significant, and linear SVMs are much faster to train.
Another interesting point to consider is correlation. Both, linear and non-linear are affected by highly correlated features (see this answer).