After all the XRPs are given away, how will new users acquire them? They will have to buy them. That means they had to forgo consumption of something else in order to get XRPs. This is no different than the energy consumed for mining; They had to forgo the consumption that the energy could have allowed, in order to create XRPs. The only difference is that the respective electric company was the counterparty instead of OpenCoin.

But anyway the definition of "fair" and "wasteful" is going to be rather subjective and really there's no way for someone who works for the company that owns all the currency to answer in an objective fashion.