True, those people should go back to drooling back on their back porches and leave the early adoption to the early adopters :-)
Eventually those back porch people will be happily swiping their cards or paying by their phones not even suspecting that txs are clearing on the world-wide ripple network.
The risk is even higher politically than technically. Before ripple can become a major financial clearing network, it's entirely possible that fed would make a move against ripple and its gateways ala egold. The fact that ripple is located in US doesn't help it either. True it's a lot more difficult to shutdown than egold, but you never know how much of a market would be left if OpenCoin is in trouble.
Same risk exists for bitcoin although to a lesser extent as bitcoin is not a corporation and does not involve banking system directly.
Kudos to ripple team to take on this uphill battle. I am thrilled to see that after the fall of egold and liberty dollar, bitcoin then ripple is now opening new battleground to free money itself from the clutch of states and their central banks.
The idea is that Opencoin will not own Ripple, and that Ripple itself will be decentralized. The system won't be worth anything without gateways, but at the moment I don't see any clear reason why gateways couldn't operate legally. If they comply with the same laws as regular banks do, why not?