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Devin,
Not disagreeing with you here, but can't we just all get along. Just kidding. My personal opinion is that we are going to see centralized controllers around for quite a while yet. Just as we won't see everyone moving wholesale to 802.11n yet. I have been glad at the uptick in people seeing wireless move from being a 'well just in the conference rooms' to 'we need to whole campus blanketed'. And yes, I agree with you that people are seeing fairly rapidly with 802.11n rollouts that they now have a problem with figuring out how they are going to handle all that extra bandwidth. My experience in the field so far has been that a lot of customers first realization is that 100 MB switches won't cut it anymore and that is a huge expense for them to upgrade just to support the new AP's they bought. The next realization is that their shiny new 802.11n AP's need more power than those old switches PoE will support. Hmm more cost you say to do this. They start to wonder if they can cut corners now and just install the damn thing then worry about the other stuff later. Notice I haven't even got to the vendor architecture decision yet? This is why I think we will continue to see the centralized controllers, because by the time people get to considering what the best architecture is for their needs they are often trying to balance the budget their boss has given them to put wireless everywhere with what their current infrastructure will support and then they start to consider who amongst the people they know have deployed WiFi already so they can be familiar with the product and have people to go to ask questions to make them look good in front of their boss.
I know what you are saying is not stupid and is logical as wireless speeds get higher and higher. However fast other vendors move towards this kind of design, there will be a certain amount of inertia involved in bringing customers along with it. Thankfully we have many people working at Universities that are willing to take a shot at trying new ways of doing things.