I don't see the big deal. As most people have said, they fall into the lower 95% of the population. The top 5% that are using 5, 10, 15 GB per month doing god-knows-what, should be throttled (or optimized, as VZ likes to put it).
I'm on AT&T and I wanted tethering so I gave up my unlimited data plan on my iPhone 4. No sweat. I've never gone over, nor do I ever plan to. I use WiFi at home, work, Starbucks, BAM, B&N, cafes, restaurants, etc. Most places offer it now. I only ever use tethering in the car if my wife wants to use her laptop or iPad while we're driving or if I'm in an airport or traveling and the hotel charges for WiFi (which is ridiculous, but best saved for another time).
However, there are people out there (people at my work included) that use their iPhones to stream Pandora 8 hours a day. That's a huge amount of data. Have 7 million people doing that all day every day and you've got a huge drain on the already strained cellular networks (not just AT&T, but Verizon, TMobile, Sprint, etc.). It's not fair that some people abuse it just because they can. Not to mention people that are using their phones as wireless hot spots at home because they are too cheap to buy home internet service...
I see no problem limiting the network hogs. Nobody needs that much data on a cell phone anyway. Go get a laptop and cozy up with a cup of coffee at a cafe and download all you want.
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