But complaints about Firewire aren't about religion. Firewire and USB 2.0 are only "interchangeable" if you don't already own thousands of dollars' worth of Firewire-only peripherals. Which quite a few people do.

Yes, there are probably converters out there somewhere, or there will be. But will they affect latency? Will they affect driver stability? The owners of $1200 audio interfaces worry about such things. A lot.

Of course, this is not yet the end of the world. As the article points out, Apple still offers Firewire on the MacBook Pro. Moreover, they are still selling machines like my white Macbook, with Firewire, for less money than the new Macbooks. So it's not as if Firewire is being phased out tomorrow. But I don't blame customers for pushing back. If people can convince Apple to keep Firewire around for an additional year, that's one more year that I don't have to spend several hundred bucks to replace my Firewire-based audio interface and hard drive enclosures.

I don't care that FireWire isn't in the new MacBooks, but it is a much better interface than USB. I don't have FireWire devices and don't do anything that would benefit that greatly from FireWire (like video devices or external hard drives). However, I can understand why people who had invested in FireWire devices or people who would benefit from the better interface would be annoyed. The problem for those people is that, just like SCSI, very few people need the advantages of FireWire.