I've seen many people lately criticising bitcoin's lack of authority as a possible weakness. From what it seems, users have to put (at least some) trust to miners and pools and rely on them for things like generating blocks with updated clients, including transactions etc. Wouldn't such an issue scale up as bitcoin grows? Could it be addressed somehow?
At some point Bitcoin needs to gain full autonomy. Physical gold doesn't have a co-dependent relationship with anyone, and neither should Bitcoin.
The thing Satoshi probably would have done, if he hadn't been frightened into the shadows, is integrate a voting mechanism into the client. The bitcoin collective would then steer and shape the currency. I think something like this is in the works now, so Bitcoin should be just fine.