Kind of sounds stupid if Bitcoin gets really busy that you have to "pay fees" to make sure your transactions go by faster. This is a silly gimmick to the whole idea of Bitcoin doesn't make sense.
It's an inevitable consequence of finite supply of bitcoins. When the mining reward gets lowered to 25 BTC at block 210000 (and then lower by half every 210000 blocks), there has to be some mechanism to compensate miners for their hashing effort. Otherwise they will stop hashing and without them, the transactions will not be processed.