Since starting my Chinese studies, I've changed my mind entirely.

First and foremost, the characters are far from random; the system is very different than an alphabetic one, but it works -- providing the reader (or even the learner) with hints as to the meaning and pronunciation. It's not perfect, but it's not nearly as bad as you might think. But yes, it means that if I see a character I haven't learned before, I can be a bit stuck. And yes, Chinese children spend lots of time learning characters in school.

Secondly, Chinese has a ridiculous number of homophones. Even if you take the tones into account, there are lots and lots and lots of characters that sound precisely the same when spoken. However, they look completely different. For example, the character 店 (for a shop) and 电 (electricity) look totally different, but sound precisely the same, diàn. This makes understanding the language difficult (as I'm learning), but a switch to Pinyin (the Latin-character transliteration) would make the written language as ambiguous and hard to read as the spoken language is to hear.

Thirdly, there's a huge amount of national pride associated with characters. I can't imagine telling the Chinese people, or even a subset of them, that they'll be abandoning characters in favor of Pinyin.

Now, does this mean that Chinese is unlikely to overtake English as the international language of business and academia? Yes; I think that English has firmly cemented itself in that position for a long time to come. (I say this one day after returning from teaching a course in Brussels, where my students were from Belgium, Holland, Italy, Portugal, Germany, and Serbia... and spoke English among themselves.) But there's a difference between saying that English will continue to dominate in business, and saying that Chinese characters have to be tossed out. The latter just isn't going to happen.