It's always better to be pleasantly surprised that a service is around than shocked when it shuts down. I agree in that the lesson should be to be skeptical, because it prevents people from being complacent with their information. I'd much rather pay for Reader or similar services from Google, but that would easily attract hate from the "Google always made free products" stance that's circulated around a lot.

Even if Google doesn't go back from killing Reader, they've seen the response that this particular shutdown has caused. It would be suicide for them to do it again (especially in this manner), so I reckon they'll be more cautious next time. Then again, fool me once...