Often times mobile devices crush the page down into its device dimensions, resulting in a thumbnail-looking preview of the entire site. Again, not very helpful to many users on mobile devices.
You're asking that they either 1) have high-density displays 2) superb eye-sight, or 3) familiarity with the site to know what is where so they can immediately zoom into their areas of interest.
Out of curiosity, I just pulled up AListApart on my laptop, and Lumia 920. I browsed both, side-by-side, and found equality in the experience on both devices - can you tell me what is inferior about ALA's RWD?
It's probably time in this discussion to expression appreciation for your time, and that of others, and to assure everybody that I mean no disrespect to any of you.
Here's a more neutral example - http://readwrite.com/ - the entire right column ends up removed.
Modern mobile and tablet browsers don't really need much if any special consideration beyond 'no flash'.
Also, nobody is advocating a broken responsive web design. And to be honest, depending on the way it's broken, it may still be much better than a fixed-width design that hangs 80% off your screen. Missing content means missing conversions.