In my opinion faucets are mostly waste of time. I can understand people who use them tho - an additional income is better than none, right? However, in my opinion there is so much things to do, like creating your own site and putting ads on it, but people don't want to take effort. And that's fine. Everyone does what he likes and it's right.
I agree that creating your own site etc is going to earn you more in the long run but a lot of people don't have the technical know-how to do this. That's another benefit of faucets - they're so easy to use anyone can do it and as they get more confident they're going to start using bitcoin more which can only be a good thing.
People need to understand that you're not going to make you're millions from faucets, but you can pick up a few dollars/pounds in coins if you use the right faucets and strategy. As long as people go in it knowing this then I can only see faucets as a good thing.
I agree with other posters about the browser mining situation - visitors must give consent for this otherwise it's going to put loads of people off. Out of principle I instantly click away from sites that automatically start mining.