I've literally never experienced any negative repercussions from not having a LinkedIn account. I deleted it years ago and switched jobs twice since. In all of my applications or interviews, I just say that I dislike the way LinkedIn captures personal data and everyone understands and doesn't care. I also offer to share my Stack Overflow Careers page with them and they are perfectly happy with it, in fact some have even commented about how much more useful that is.

I really don't understand what value regular users are getting (let alone people paying for Premium). Part of me believes people will realize this and delete accounts en masse, but then I remember how status obsessed everyone is and I have my doubts. LinkedIn is sort of like Zynga for career status, so I suspect there is a lot of user psychology they can manipulate.