I think things could be a lot worse, how the game looks to play out in the vids appears solid and exciting to me, but then I enjoyed the hell out of MW, playing through SP many times and I was hooked on MP from day one. Now hearing about the no-dedi servers and no mods is extremely dissapointing but it's not the end of the world for this guy. If the MP is solid, and I can track my buddies via steam and join a game they're in and vice-versa, I'll be content. I don't mind dedicated servers, especially for scrims and clan matches.
I think MW2 can still be a damn fine title and extremely successful, but without those two things, IW better be very certain that the level of polish and options elsewhere are that much more worth it, and then a bag of chips. Getting this kind of negative news after so many months of hype and excitement is a very bad thing obviously, but I think there's a reason behind why they decided to announce it now...and really I still have hopes for a Steam provided dedicated client in the future, similar to how L4D's worked.
I did sign the petition, but at the same time that doesn't mean I will not purchase the game...there's still more to do in SP, now with coop stuff, and even with matchmaking a very strong MP element, all of which sounds to be a damn good game to me. Looking through all the bullshit, I still see a solid shooter that could kick some serious ass and possibly even end up with dedicated and mod support in the future, especially if things keep going this way, they will want to keep players in the game...and will give in. MW rocked, WaW was OK, CoD2 was kickass and UO was amazing, all of them I like, but I gotta say I enjoyed MW MP the most with my clan out of all of them...not many games get the fast paced adrenalin pumping experience you can achieve from MW's MP...I hope to see that again in MW2. And if it fails, well I have borderlands on preorder and Bad Company 2 to look forward to in the future, but I'm pretty confident that MW2 will still kickass, it just needs to be that much more-so if it wants to make the sales it might be losing now because of a couple simple things that are major to some, and a problem to many.